Animus Facit Nobilem
by Camudekyu
Summary: The Black Order dispatches exorcists to investigate strange cargo confiscated off the coast of Malta. Only after it is too late do Lenalee and Lavi realize that they might have bitten off more than they can chew.
1. Relief and Panic

**A/N:** I am terribly new to the fandom. Pointers are much appreciated. Thanks, y'all.

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**Animus Facit Nobilem**

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"The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life."

Lord Byron

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**I. Relief & Panic**

Lavi let out a long, extravagant sigh and fell backwards onto the beige, canvas cushions of a wicker chaise lounge, arms and legs sprawled like a house cat on linoleum in July. Once horizontal, he stretched languorously and reached for his whiskey sour on a small table to the right of his deck chair.

He sighed again, protracted and loud, and cracked his one eye. Lenalee stood just to his left, arms crossed and mouth twisted into a small, lopsided frown. Lavi pulled a long, biting swig off his tumbler, ice clinking.

Lenalee didn't seem to be taking the hint. Lavi crossed one ankle over the other and sighed once more, this one ending in a wide yawn.

"Enough already!" Lenalee burst, throwing her hands in the air. "What does this look like? A pleasure cruise?"

Lavi chuckled. She was so cute when she got mad. "We're on a boat," he said, "it's eighty degrees outside, not a cloud in the sky, and the sea's the color of your lovely eyes." He flashed her a winsome smile, peering up at her.

Lenalee set her fists against her hips and leaned over him. "Nice try, Lavi," she rejoined. "My eyes are brown."

"He swings. He misses," Lavi muttered. He gave her a sheepish grin, made all the more sheepish-looking by the shadow she cast over him.

"You're going to burn through your per diem in, like, two hours if you buy any more drinks, you know," Lenalee warned him.

The ice in his tumbler sang as Lavi downed the last of his drink and set the glass down hard with an gruff _ahhhh_. He rolled out of his seat and hopped to his feet. The motion was so fast that Lenalee barely had time to register the blur of movement before Lavi was standing before her, leaning down so that they were practically nose to nose.

"You need to unwind," he said and seized her right hand. He held her hand up and spun her like a dance partner. Always light on her feet, Lenalee let him twirl her and deposit her into the chaise lounge. She frowned at him as he dropped to one knee on the deck, looped his right arm around her shoulders and gestured to the Valletta Grand Harbor off to starboard. "Look at that, Lenalee. That's Malta. The Order has paid for us to come to Malta. _Indefinitely._ I know how long it's been since _I've_ had a vacation, and I'm gonna bet it's been just as long for you."

"This isn't a vacation, Lavi," she told him. "We've got an assignment, which, by the way, I want to go over with you before your next whiskey sour."

Lavi stood up straight and rubbed his chin. "I've had enough whiskey sours. It's time for a Tom Collins, I think." At the frustrated noise Lenalee made before throwing herself back into the chaise lounge, Lavi grinned and looked down at her. "Relax, would you? I'm only joking," he gave her a dismissive wave and added, "And I am cone sold stober." He waited for a laugh that never came.

"This isn't an opportunity to let our hair down," Lenalee said, frowning at the gleaming walls of Malta's largest port as they got closer and closer.

The closest structure, hugging the shore where the land jutted out into the water, looked rather like a fortress with its high, windowless ramparts and stone parapets. The coast beyond that was lined by other whitewashed buildings, all crammed together right up against the sea. The glassy water below reflected the pale faces and vivid sky, like the world here was simply a blue canvas stamped with white strokes. It was so beautiful, so unlike anything she'd ever seen before. And the water was an impossible, eternal blue. It looked like something fabricated with artistic license. It was perfect. Almost too perfect.

And in a few hours, she would put herself on high alert. While the first stage of her assignment was to determine if there was Innocence involved at all, there was certainly something fishy going on in the village of Qrendi, and Lenalee knew that the kind of fishy that would attract the Black Order would certainly attract all kinds of unwholesome characters.

No, this was no vacation.

Lavi made a show of adjusting his headband and fiddling with his hair. "Hey, lookit," he said, pointing at his messy coiffure. "Totally not down."

He was trying to make her laugh, Lenalee knew. So she smiled up at him. It was one of those sweet, resigned sort of smiles that was part apology and part warning. And it certainly wasn't the kind Lavi was used to seeing on Lenalee. He sank down next to her on the chaise lounge, his left thigh brushing her right.

"We're gonna breeze in, take care of business, and breeze out," he said. "And if we're lucky, we can find a way to make all that breezing take a week or so. Maybe we can include snorkeling and sunbathing and beach-bumming as part of that breeze, too."

"You're not nervous at all, are you?" Lenalee laughed.

Lavi shrugged. "Not really. I don't think we've got reason to expect anything out of the ordinary."

Lenalee laughed at that. "Yeah, ordinary. Big, soul-sucking monsters and grief-crazy bystanders."

"Piece a' cake," Lavi said with a sweeping gesture. "To be honest, I'm a little surprised to hear that you're nervous. You've been doing this for long enough."

"I'm not nervous," Lenalee said a little defensively and stood up from the deck chair. "But I know it doesn't take much for an easy assignment to become a hard one."

Lavi watched her lace her fingers together and hold the backs of her hands against her tailbone as she walked toward the briny railing. When she drew up to the edge, Lenalee untwined her hands and rested her elbows against the flaking white paint of the railing. The breeze off the sea blew over her, and that was an awfully nice tableau to watch from where he sat, Lavi thought. It lifted her dark hair off her shoulders and made the hem of her skirt dance distractingly. Lavi cleared his throat—his own quiet chastisement—and stood as well.

"So, do you want to go over an action plan before we dock?" Lavi asked as he came up to Lenalee's left.

She turned to him, her mouth open for a reply, when the deck beneath their feet suddenly lurched so violently, it threw them both against the railing. Lavi reflexively thrust his arm out to catch Lenalee and keep her ribs from crunching hard against the iron bars. He felt his own solar plexus slam into the bar, and the force of the sudden jolt tossed them both backwards onto the deck boards, all the while, a deafening groan—part screaming girders and part belligerent leviathan—drowned out the sea sounds and screaming passengers.

Lavi looked around him, saw the other mingling bodies on deck in similar states of prone disarray. The intense shaking of the ferry and the metallic screaming went on, and Lavi looked down at Lenalee, on top of whom he had unintentionally spilled himself, to see her covering her ears and curling against the deck. He hooked an arm around her ribs and yanked her close, kept her covered, a gesture he would later avoid looking at too hard—the intense look of fear on her face seemed to ask for that little bit of succor. Lavi himself hunkered down and ducked his face against Lenalee's shoulder, his jaw clenched and eye squeeze closed.

When the shaking and shrieking finally subsided—it felt like a quarter hour of din had passed—both Lavi and Lenalee looked up hesitantly. There was no smoke or wreckage. The sun still shone clear overhead. Other passengers began shakily climbing to their feet.

"What the hell was that?" Lavi asked no one in particular.

Lenalee, who gingerly touched the arch of her cheekbone which had cracked hard against the deck, replied rather dazedly, "I think we ran aground."

They hardily had time to begin standing themselves when the ship lurched again, this time laterally. Lenalee shrieked, and she and Lavi flopped back to the floor. The whole ferry seemed to tilt toward starboard, tilting the deck and tossing people and furniture like so many pinballs.

He and Lenalee pitched across the floor. Lavi's back struck the metal railing with a loud, hollow _clang_. While they weren't flung with the force of the first impact, the combination of his weight and Lenalee's made the iron bars bite into his spine hard. He sucked in a breath sharply.

"Lavi!" Lenalee cried over the screams of other passengers, gravity pinning her against him. "Are you okay?"

"Peachy," he groaned, and compared to some of the other passengers, particularly those who had had time to stand, he really was.

The ferry lurched again, the groaning now directly below them. While Lavi's back was to the sea, Lenalee could see over his shoulder as their world rolled disturbingly close to the water. She thought she might be sick and pressed her face to Lavi's sternum.

"Tell me when it's over," she moaned into his coat. He responded by cinching his arms tight around her.

When the tremors turned to shudders and then to shivers, Lenalee tentatively raised her face from Lavi's shirtfront. The crunch and grind of metal on earth faded as well, replaced by the slap of waves against the hull.

"You didn't puke on me, did you?" Lenalee heard Lavi, and she looked up into his grimacing face.

"I thought about it," she admitted.

She felt his arms loosen on her as he began to push them both up. "Good," he said through his gritted teeth. "'Cause that would have been a deal-breaker."

Lenalee let out a cough of a laugh. The combination of their tangled limbs and the awful angle of the deck made for a very awkward scramble. Walking was certainly not an option, so they crawled, putting their hands and knees on the iron bars of the railing which were now closer to being beneath them than the deck. The bottle-blue water crashed against the hull below them, and Lavi had to keep giving Lenalee the most gentle taps to keep her from looking down.

They reached a ledge in the deck where a length of rope railing branched perpendicularly away from the gunwale, and Lavi managed to haul them both up that length of railing, away from the plunge off the side of the ship. He scrambled toward the sky, straddling a wide, upright post, and hoisted Lenalee onto the same post, positioning her sidesaddle.

"What now?" she asked, her knuckles pale from clinging to Lavi's coat in one hand and the splintery rope in the other.

"I think we wait to be rescued," Lavi said, sounding like he didn't really care for the idea.

Lenalee began to laugh quietly into her hand. Lavi gave her a rather concerned look. "I'm sorry," she said through her laughter. "It's just," she paused and forced her giggles down, and with a broad gesture, she announced ironically, "Welcome to Malta!"

The ferry rocked again, and Lenalee threw herself against Lavi, curling a strangling grip into his coat.


	2. Frustration and Resignation

**A/N:** Qrendi is, indeed, a real town in Malta. It's on the southwestern shore, and Google makes it look just lovely. St. Matthias Parish Church is made up, though. The Feast of the Ascension isn't. The Maltese throw down for it. Thank you to my one reviewer, who has just lavished this story with attention. I was ready to take this story down and try it elsewhere. There is more to come, so enjoy.

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**II. Frustration & Resignation**

Police greeted them on the wharf as soon as they stepped off the second, smaller ferry that had picked them up. The first ferry had run aground and was quickly rolling farther and farther onto its side as the tide ebbed. A small flock of journalists met them as well, and both Lavi and Lenalee made an effort to avoid the questions and flashbulbs. It was, after all, the policy of Black Order field agents to keep a low profile, and Lenalee imagined her brother would not appreciate learning about the accident by seeing her pale, drawn face on the front page of a Maltese newspaper. She was sporting a pretty nice shiner, too, and all that seemed like a the perfect combination to give Komui an aneurysm.

Lavi seemed ready to stop and chat when a tall, blonde woman with a pretty smile and a tablet in her hand tried to wave them down, but Lenalee grabbed his sleeve and dragged him toward the Immigration Office. They walked with the rest of the passengers, pilly, grey blankets like mantels and luggage in hand. Lavi divested of his own blanket rather quickly—it was, after all, a balmy August day on the Mediterranean—but Lenalee hung on to hers a bit longer.

The sun hung low and swollen in the enameled-blue sky when they found seats on a bench outside a cafe, each holding a black bean and fish taco wrapped in waxed paper. They had wasted more than two hours after the wreck, waiting for the crew to organize enough to call for a rescue ferry. Then it had taken even longer to get passengers off the gradually capsizing ship—Lavi and Lenalee had, of course, simply leapt from one deck to another, but the other passengers had required all manner of slides and ladders and assistance. And now, so far behind schedule that Lenalee had crumpled up their itinerary and tossed it into her suitcase, they resigned themselves to the comfort of street food while they regrouped.

"We've got to catch a ride to Qrendi on the southern shore. There are two finders waiting to rendezvous with us at St. Matthias Parish Church," Lenalee paused to wipe savory juice off her chin. "Brother told me one of the finders has been here for a little while now, and he'll set up lodging for us." She shrugged and added. "No one at HQ can speak Maltese, so we're pretty much at this guy's mercy."

"So, step one," Lavi said before he popped the last bite of soft taco into his mouth, "We've got to find a ride to Qrendi."

Easier said than done, it would seem. There were no trains on an island so small. Hailing a cab was simple enough once Lavi realized that he had to fling himself into the street before the horse, but trying to explain to the driver where they needed to go was almost impossible. When they did find someone with a working grasp of English, the driver pulled a face at the fistful of francs Lavi produced and drove away before the two foreigners could figure out how to explain themselves. The ten miles to their destination were, if it came to it, walkable, but Lenalee was not sure which packed, dusty road to take.

Just as Lenalee was resigning herself to finding them a church floor to sleep on and trying again in the morning—the sun was sinking lower and lower toward hilly western horizon—Lavi trotted up to a group of men loading crates into a covered cart. From the bench where she sat, Lenalee watched her assignment partner attempt communication with a combination of big, elaborate gestures and the few Maltese words he'd picked up over their long, disappointing afternoon.

It must have worked, however, because it wasn't long before Lavi was moving crates along side the swarthy men to whom he had been speaking and flailing.

"They didn't want our money," Lavi grunted over the edge of a crate in his arms, "So I offered to help them load up in trade for a ride." How he had communicated something this complex, Lenalee didn't know, but she was grateful nonetheless. She also was quite tickled to see Lavi, who was all wire and height, struggle with the same crates that the stout, broad Maltese men lifted with ease. She earned herself quite a sincere, one-eyed glare when Lavi noticed her tittering behind her hand.

The sky was peach and fire when the cart was fully loaded. In the few open feet of space at the rear of the bed, Lavi, Lenalee, and three men crowded. Another man climbed into the driver's perch at the front, gathered up the reins on two, heavy-looking donkeys, and pointed them south.

As they trundled away from the sea, the three men in the cart bed with them chatted loudly and cheerfully, occasionally gesturing at the two funny-looking kids across from them. The two of them couldn't have looked more like tourists, Lavi thought as he glanced between Lenalee and himself: his partner was pale as fondant compared to these leathery Maltese men; his red hair probably looked like some kind of mutation to the locals; and Lavi didn't think he saw one other person dumb enough to wear anything long-sleeved, black, or wool.

Lavi did his best to converse with the Maltese men, but when one of the men pointed at Lenalee, waggled his dark brows, and said something that sounded like it had a suggestive question mark on the end, Lavi redirected his attention onto his assignment partner. He made a show, Lenalee noticed, of cramming her farther into a corner between the side of the cart and a crate and sprawling himself out as far as he could.

"I can take care of myself, thank you," Lenalee whispered at him as though their cart-mates might overhear and take offense.

"Yeah, well, that guy looked ready to take care of you, too, so just humor me," Lavi muttered back. He noticed how dark that black eye was getting when he leaned in close to speak to her, and he quickly looked away.

The road began to slope up. The climb was gradual at first, but as the donkeys plodded on, Lavi and Lenalee had to brace themselves from bumping right out the back of the cart. All the crates were tied down, and the three Maltese men seemed almost unaware of the precarious slant to the cart. They went of talking and laughing in big, careless voices while Lenalee clung to the straps holding in the crates and Lavi clung to Lenalee. When the cart went over a particularly sharp bump, Lavi had the reflexes to slam his heel down on Lenalee's suitcase before it bounced right out of the cart.

At last, the ground leveled out—Lenalee could feel the lightness in her breath compared to the thick, salt-heavy air by the sea—and they rumbled to a stop. They heard the driver call out, "_San Mattia?_" from the head of the cart, and Lenalee knew this was their stop. Lavi scooted out first, pausing to shake hands and exchange pointless words with the men. He set their luggage on the packed earth of the street and then, thinking of that black eye, helped Lenalee down from the cart.

"Would you quit it?" Lenalee asked, swatting his hands on her waist. "I'm not going to break."

Lavi didn't respond. He gathered their things, said his goodbyes to the driver, and moved out of the street.

They were now in a rather weather-worn town, the last vestiges of day fading out along the western horizon. The buildings were all about the same height and width, all crammed together, squarish, and whitewashed with unembellished windows and entrances. Lanterns burned in sconces on most of the storefronts, all designated with long, flat signs over the doors. There were no streetlamps, making the light inconsistent. Lenalee and Lavi were alone on the street now that the cart had trundled off around a turn in the road

Across the street from them, however, was the biggest structure as far as they could see down the three roads that intersected where they stood. Tall, iron lampposts flanked the heavy, oak doors of St. Matthias Parish Church, which stood imposing and pale over the squat buildings at her feet. Beyond the atrium, two sharp bell towers and a spined, red cupola rose high into the velvety night sky, and live, flickering lamps burned high in the towers. The light from the lamps illuminated the white face of the church and spilled over the cobblestone courtyard before the entrance, making it look rather like a sort of unwelcoming beacon in the heart of town.

"I told you this wasn't a vacation," Lenalee said.

There were no signs of the finders who were supposed to meet them, which Lenalee had expected. They were, after all, almost four hours late. "Let's go inside," Lavi said, rubbing his rear. "I want to put my ass in a chair that isn't capsizing, shaking violently, or otherwise trying to jettison me."

That seemed as good a plan as any, so Lenalee lead the way toward the church. It took all of her strength and some of Lavi's to get the heavy door open, and together they slipped into the dim, quiet atrium. The walls were a dark, rich red color, old and flaking in the corners, and stylized images of St. Matthias and his cohorts hung on every wall, waited in every alcove, stared down from the low ceiling.

At the rear of the atrium, elaborate wrought iron gates rose out of the tiled floor, with three doorways opening into a short arcade, lamps tucked high in the pale, stone arches. And beyond the arcade, the ceiling climbed to dizzying height and the chapel yawned outward, long and narrow.

Lavi opened his mouth to holler out a "Anybody home?" but Lenalee clapped her hand over his mouth and pressed a finger to her lips when he glared down over her fingers.

"Vespers," she hissed and jabbed her finger toward the few backs they could see in the pews that stretched out ahead of them. At the head of the nave, the chancel was demarcated by a low, wooden railing. Cream-colored pillar candles illuminated the altar and the backdrop of ornate arches abutting one another, housing austere-looking icons. "Let's find a nun or something. Maybe the finders left us a message," Lenalee said, her hand still covering Lavi's mouth.

He managed to wrench away, still glaring. "Fine. We'll do it your way," he whispered. Something about the dark gathered in the corners, the tranquil, bowed faces, the muted shuffle of feet seemed to compel Lenalee to silence, but it had the opposite effect on Lavi. He would much rather fill all that hushed space with something. He fought the urge to whistle, knowing from the weary, strained look on Lenalee's face that he probably get a Dark Boot to the scrotum if he didn't watch himself.

They crept down the nave, casting about for someone who looked like they might work there. Lenalee realized that she was beginning to hunker down as the walked, the effect of the sheers walls, the long, lit alcoves, and the tall, peaceful statues of saints.

As they drew up to the chancel, a short, dark-haired woman in a plain, grey dress approached them. She certainly didn't look like a nun, but she had an air of belonging about her.

"Good evening," the woman said in a soft voice, her words thick with her exotic-sounding accent.

Lavi was more than a little relieved to find someone they wouldn't need to play charades with. "Hello," Lenalee said, bowing her head a little. "My name is Lenalee, and this is Lavi, and we were supposed to meet a couple friends here. Do you know if anyone left a message here for us?"

"I'm sorry, no," the woman explained slowly, working the words around her mouth. "Two men waited here earlier, but I believe they left an hour or so ago."

Lenalee's shoulders slumped. "Oh," she said and looked over her shoulder at Lavi. He shrugged. "In that case, do you know of a good inn?"

The woman put a hand over her mouth and laughed quietly. "I'm sorry, no," she said, smiling.

"No?" Lenalee blurted, louder than she meant to. She cringed apologetically when her voice seemed to reverberate off the chapel walls.

"No," the woman went on, "In two days is the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lady in Heaven. You will find no inn with vacancies in Qrendi."

"The Feast of Who?" Lavi asked over Lenalee's shoulder. She looked back at him with a frown that let him know that she was not in the mood for his off-color humor. He dropped it. "You got a Plan B?" he asked. "I'm okay with a barn somewhere, but I know you don't do that."

Lenalee sighed. "We just need to find a floor for the night," she grumbled. "Why didn't those dumb finders wait for us?"

"Please excuse me," the woman said. Lenalee turned back to her. "We have rooms for travelers here. It is not an inn, but there is a loft you may use." She looked past Lenalee at Lavi. "Your friend, however... we do not have room for him."

"What? Why?" Lavi demanded as well as he could with his voice lowered.

The woman put up her hands. She, of course, had not meant any offense. "There is only one open room," she explained, "The Bishop would not approve."

Lenalee didn't immediately understand, and only when Lavi looped an arm around her shoulders, tucked her close to his side, and leaned toward the woman did she get it. "Can't share a room with my own wife?" he asked through a big grin.

Lenalee's spine got very straight, and her shoulders went rigid under Lavi's arm. She felt the mingled sensations of her burning face and cold, heavy ire in her stomach.

"Oh, please excuse me," the woman said, smiling apologetically and putting up her palms once more. "I did not realize. Of course." She laughed quietly and put a hand to her chest.

Lavi laughed and rubbed the back of his head with free hand. "We're honeymooning!" he announced and gave Lenalee a squeeze and a shake, "Right, hon?"

She stared up at him, none of the sunny, marital bliss from Lavi's face mirrored on her own. "Right," Lenalee replied through gritted teeth.


	3. Comfort and Rest

**A/N:** Here we are. Chapter 3. Thanks, y'all.

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**III. Comfort & Rest**

The woman showed them through a passage off to the right of a chancel, and they entered a wide corridor lit by oil lamps in sconces on the stone walls. Closed red doors stood in both walls, and between the doorways were paintings of saints in various stages of suffering. They followed the corridor until it turned to the left, and they passed through a passageway into a large, unadorned room occupied by long tables and benches. A few travel-worn people lingered in this room, and they paid the newcomers little attention. Their host showed them to seats and offered them bowls of thick potato and ham stew and hunks of dark, crusty bread. St. Matthias did not, she explained, have spoons, as their kitchen had been robbed recently. The shallow wooden bowls she handed them, in fact, had been a donation from a parishioner, and they drank water out of smudged mason jars. Neither Lavi nor Lenalee complained, however, and they sat side-by-side, knees and elbows touching, and slurped their stew straight from their bowls.

With dinner finished, their guide showed them farther down another corridor—this one lacking the paintings and intricate sconces of the first corridor—to a doorless passage that ended sharply in a narrow, unlit stairwell that went up and up into a dusty darkness. She handed them a brass candle holder with a stub in it, which she lit from a lamp hanging from a chain on the wall.

"It's not much," she apologized, "But you'll find clean sheets and breakfast in the morning."

Lavi accepted the candle from the woman. He and Lenalee thanked their host for her generosity, and Lavi took the lead up the stairs.

Their loft was indeed sparse. The ceiling was low enough to force Lavi to stoop slightly, particularly when he came through the doorway. The bed was narrow, little more than a cot, and looked as though, if Lavi were to lay in it, his feet would hang off the end. He lit an oil lamp on the table with his candlestick and lengthened the wick, pushing the gritty shadows into the corners of the room. They had a single window above the head of the bed, and it looked out onto the city below, now nothing more than a collection of lanterns, hovering in the dark like fireflies.

"Well," Lenalee said with a sigh, "It's not a barn." She set her suitcase on the bed and flicked open the latches. Carefully, she shuffled her clothes around—she did her best not to flash her unmentionables at Lavi—and pulled out her sleeping shift. She saw Lavi's legs stretching out next to her suitcase, and she looked up to see him reclining in the bed, grinning at her, and gently patting the spot to his left.

"So," he teased and waggled his one visible brow, "You want to come up here and keep me company, wifey?"

Lenalee threw a sock at his face and it hit him across the chin. "I don't appreciate being used like that. Can you warn me next time you're going to pull that kind of stunt?" she said. "Also, I don't know if you realize it, but you lied to a nun."

"She wasn't a nun," Lavi interjected, angling himself up on his elbows. "She wasn't wearing one of those penguin suits."

Lenalee ignored him. "You also lied right there in the chapel. In front of God and everyone." She relatched her suitcase and slid it under the bed.

Lavi gave her a dismissive wave. "I lie in front of God all the time. Besides, He's seen me do all kinds of stuff I wouldn't—"

Lenalee stopped him before he could elaborate. "That may be, Lavi, but I bet He pays closer attention to the offenses that go on in His house, against His employees."

Lavi sank back onto the bed, crossed his ankles, and laced his fingers behind his head. "Hey, would you rather me have to sleep outside?"

Lenalee stood up, her shift in her hands, and looked at him. His feet did hang off the foot of the bed, and that made him look even longer. She did not realize that she was scanning up his body—sinewy legs to narrow hips to sharp shoulders—until she met his gaze, a lopsided grin on his face. Lenalee started and glared at him, her face burning. "Maybe I would," she snapped, putting a fist against her hip. "Now, would you face the wall so I can change?"

Lavi shrugged and gave a long-suffering sigh. He picked a corner to stand near, pulling his pajama pants out of his suitcase as he went.

"No peeking," Lenalee demanded.

"Same goes to you," Lavi replied, and they took up posts on opposite ends of the tiny room, their backs to one another. Lavi hesitated at first, listening to the rustling of Lenalee's clothes, and staring hard a knot in the floorboard. He heard her Black Order brooch clank against the floor then the whisper of linen over skin. Lavi swallowed, furrowed his brow, and began changing into his own striped, linen sleeping pants and undershirt.

Lenalee had never undressed so fast in her life, and after a few terrifying moments, she was smoothing her sleeping shift down her thighs. "So," she began, protracting the _o _and hazarding a peek over her shoulder, "How do we want to handle sleeping arrangements?" She saw that Lavi had changed and was lazily folding his slacks with his back to her. With a sigh of relief, she sat on the rickety bed and folded her arms over her chest.

He hitched up his sleeves, baring his forearms. "Looks like you've got two choices," Lavi said, setting his pants and coat across the back of the only chair in the room. He then sank into the chair himself and stretched out one long leg in front of him and rested his ankle on top of his knee. He held up his hand and counted off Lenalee's options. "Big spoon or little spoon."

Lenalee laughed and launched the pillow at his face. "Or me in the bed and you somewhere else."

Lavi shrugged. "I mean, if that's what you're into." He, of course, knew as soon as they had topped the stairs that he was looking forward to a long night on the floor. He glanced at the bed. One blanket. Lenalee had thrown the only pillow, which was on the floor by his feet. He tossed it back to her. Allowing himself a long sigh, Lavi reached back and pulled his coat from the back of the chair. "So, do you want to talk business?" he asked, draping his coat over his lap.

"I suppose this is as good a time as ever," Lenalee said, rising to her feet. She turned down the blanket on the bed and seated herself on the sheets, pulling her feet up into the bed with her. "On the last Sunday in June, the people in Qrendi celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes."

"Is that different from the Ascension Lady?" Lavi asked.

"Yes," Lenalee answered a little tightly, "I couldn't tell you how, but yes. Anyway, every year they throw this enormous party. They close the streets for all the parades and marching bands. But this year, hardily anyone showed up."

Lavi rubbed his chin for a moment. "Well, that's unfortunate and all, but does that warrant a Black Order investigation?"

"Komui seems to believe that this is a symptom of something bigger. I don't think you realize how serious these people are about their Saints Days," Lenalee explained. "They throw down almost every weekend from May to October, and the Order's connection here said, since the first feast, attendance has been terrible. It's still is dropping, too."

"And?" Lavi prompted when Lenalee paused.

"_And,_" she went on, "Not one, not two, but five," she held out her right hand, five fingers extended, "smuggling vessels have been intercepted near Malta in the last thirty days."

"Picking up or dropping off?" Lavi asked.

"I need to check the police reports," Lenalee said, "But I think one of them was taking shipments to Sicily, three were bringing people in from Tunis, and another was coming in from Majorca."

Lavi furrowed his brow. "Why would people be trying to sneak into Malta from Majorca of all places? Was the first island paradise not quite good enough, so they had to find another?"

"What's really odd is when you look at the people they took off the smuggling ships coming into Malta," Lenalee said, putting up her index finger. "These weren't refugees or people looking for jobs or anything like that. These were people from the some of higher socioeconomic echelons in Tunisia and Spain. Merchants and businessmen. None of the ships had the right clearance, though. And they were all attempting to unload in Qrendi instead of going through any of the major ports."

Lavi shook his head and tutted. "Clearly someone did not give themselves the six to eight weeks the Passport Renewal Agency recommends."

"Clearly," Lenalee replied.

"So what was confiscated from the ship leaving here?"

"That's the really weird part," Lenalee said, leaning over her knees and narrowing her eyes at Lavi, "Nobody knows for sure." Lavi drew back and gave her a confused look. "I know. The most my brother was able to tell me was that witnesses reported crates being unloaded by Interpol in Syracuse. The official report out of customs said they were shipments of some kind of homeopathic remedy, but I don't believe that for a second. I mean, why would Interpol get involved in something that mundane?"

Lavi frowned and drummed his fingers on the armrest in thought. An answer came to him quickly, and he shrugged at the simplicity of it. "So, we've got mystery shipments, rich businessmen all a-tizzy, and a sweeping ennui among the townsfolk?" he asked. Lenalee nodded. "Well, that's an easy one. I've got two words for you," he said, and Lenalee cocked her head to the side a little. "Opium Wars."

She glared at him. Hard.

Remembering Lenalee's heritage, he cringed and said, "Sorry. Too soon?"

"And what makes you think opium is involved?" Lenalee asked tartly.

"Well, if rich folks want in badly enough to try to sneak in, there's got to be something bigger than money going on here. So it's either drugs or sex." Lenalee appreciated that comment almost as much as she did the Opium War one. Lavi ignored her scowl, scratched his chin, and looked thoughtful. "But there's much easier ways to traffic bodies than island hopping. Besides, you don't need to cross the puddle just for prostitutes."

Lenalee was getting more and more uncomfortable with every syllable. Her partner seemed too lost in his own speculations to notice, however.

Lavi thought another moment. "Malta doesn't strike me as a real agricultural hub, though, so I'm guessing that someone from Afghanistan or Egypt is using Malta as a distribution center for the rest of the Mediterranean. Fifty bucks say if someone flagged one of these mystery shipments out of Malta, they'd trace them all the way to England or the Netherlands or any of the wealthier countries that can afford not to grow their own poppies. And these folks trying to sneak in by the boat load are just here for the wholesale prices."

"Well, that's what we're here to find out," Lenalee said.

"That would explain the slump in production here," Lavi said matter-of-factly. "There's nothing like opium to make you change your religion."

Lenalee cast her eyes off to the side. "I suppose."

He watched her withdraw. "If we're lucky," Lavi told her cheerily, "We won't see a single Akuma out here."

"I think I'd rather fight Akuma than face a whole town of people slowly killing themselves," she said, flicking her eyes up to him. She saw him twist his mouth apologetically and lean forward. He rested his elbows against his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees.

"We knew it wasn't going to be pretty as soon as we got the assignment," he reminded her.

Lenalee nodded. She remembered.


	4. Patience and Penitence

**A/N: **This chapter _leans_ toward earning this story it's M-rating. Watch out. There's some proper M-rated material coming down the chute shortly. ;D

* * *

**IV. Patience & Penitence**

Lavi awoke first, halfhearted, buttery light creeping in through the window over the bed. He lay on the floor, feeling the ache in his neck and lower back from the barrage of the day before and from the unforgiving floor all night. The air was rather chilly so early, and his coat had been a sorry excuse for a blanket, leaving his feet numb and stiff. He rolled onto his back, laced his hands behind his head, and looked up. Lenalee snored quietly in the bed to his right, a foot or so above him. He could see her slack face, her pale, parted lips.

While the circumstances were unpleasant, there was one favor paid him that morning: by rousing first, he didn't have to go through all those awkward motions required when waking in the platonic company of a woman. His pajama pants weren't nearly heavy enough to help him out with that and, he noted with a glance toward his lower half, neither was his coat. Lavi grinned and had to stifle a laugh at the thought of trying to explain it to Lenalee. First, she'd be horrified and offended. Then he'd explain that no, it's involuntary and had nothing to do with her. Then she'd probably take that personally. Then he'd tell her that, okay, actually, she did have that effect on him—let's be honest here, most women did—but that he would never do anything about it.

And then that stopped being funny rather fast. He would never do anything about it.

With a groan, Lavi sat up and looked around the room. It was even shabbier in the creeping light. The ceiling was bowing in the middle. The plaster on the walls was cracked and greying. There were holes eaten through the baseboards. Lavi curled his lip a little when he saw the him-shaped print in the thick carpet of dust on the floor. He and Lenalee had swept lopsided crop circles in it the night before.

He glanced over at his wife-for-the-night. Lavi allowed himself a self-deprecating snort. It was certainly the closest he'd get to a proper wife. And that was just about the most pathetic thing he'd ever heard because he was definitely on the floor, cold and stiff, and trying to figure out what do with his morning wood before his pretend-wife woke up and slapped him for it.

He chuckled to himself and resolved to tell Lenalee what a lame pretend-wife she was when she woke, and he went for the leather-bound logbook he kept on his person during every journey. He kept it wrapped in a tattered linen handkerchief he had had since before he could remember. Carefully, he fished the log and a small black case out of his bag. Lavi then settled on the floor, his back against the side of the bed, and sprawled his legs out before him. Near his right knee, he set down the black case and clicked open the latch. Inside was the wooden handle and six fresh nibs of his dip pen along with a small corked well of ink and some blotting paper, all nestled in fitted, black velvet cradles. He fit a nib into the handle, stuck it between his incisors, and painstakingly pried the cork out of his ink well.

Lenalee stirred behind him, and Lavi looked over his shoulder at her. The bruise below her eye was a green and purple arc, the ends curving up around the orbit of her eye like a crescent. He twisted his mouth a little—he hadn't realized how hard she had cracked her face on the deck. The impact certainly couldn't have been improved by his falling on her in the process. Her black eye looked worse in the light. Lavi would have to talk her into putting some ice on it when she woke, ideally before people started thinking he was a pretend-wife-beater.

Turning back to the task at hand, Lavi unwrapped his logbook, draped the handkerchief over his knee, and set the book on the floor between his legs. He chewed the end of his pen for just a moment as he sorted through the snapshots in his mind. Then he dipped his pen in his ink and began to write.

Lavi recorded in his own style, one that had always frustrated his mentor, but the technique was effective enough that the elder Bookman couldn't complain too hard. Lavi cataloged events backwards from the time he started writing until he came to his previous entry. This way always made more sense to him. There were never reasons, Lavi would explain, only causes, and he wasn't trying to pen a compelling story. On the contrary, he was recording a chain of events. He could be more objective, analyze the chaos more lucidly if he began with the hurricane and worked back to the butterfly.

"I don't think—" a voice said over Lavi's shoulder, punching a hole in the dusty silence. Lavi let out a squawk and nearly knocked over his ink well. He left a fat blot on the page in his logbook.

He clapped a hand over his chest, and looked at Lenalee. "Jeez, Lenalee. You scared the crap outta me," he gasped.

She was angled up on one elbow, peering over his shoulder at the book on the floor. She laughed. "I was just going to say I've never seen you actually Bookman-ing before."

Lavi dabbed at the pooled ink on the page with his sleeve. "If you call this Bookman-ing, you haven't seen anything yet. There're guys out there who are a lot more on top of their records than I am." He grinned and closed his logbook before it was completely dry. "Speaking of being distracted, you hungry?"

That was a rather abrupt shift, Lenalee thought. She drew back a little. "If you want privacy, Lavi, I can—"

He waved her offer away. "Naw, you're fine. I was about done anyway."

Lenalee didn't look convinced—she had seen the total of two sentences he had written—but she decided not to press it. "Okay," she relented. "We should probably hang out downstairs in case those finders come looking for us."

Lavi tapped his nib against a small tablet of blotting paper in his pen case and packed up quickly. He stowed his logbook and case in his bag, feeling Lenalee's gaze on him the whole time.

They changed with their backs to each other while Lenalee went over her plan for the day. She then stripped the bed and piled the linens up by the door, and together, they made their way down the steep, narrow stairwell into the corridor below. The hall was bustling that morning, and few of the bodies looking as out of place as Lenalee and Lavi. These people, they determined, were occupants of the other guest quarters in the church. Lenalee hung close to Lavi's side as they shouldered through mingling groups of people, all chatting in Maltese.

They made their way to the packed dining room and took their bowls of porridge and jars of coffee into the hall. Lavi found them an empty corner under a heavy, wooden crucifix, and they tucked themselves close to the wall for breakfast.

"You weren't kidding about these people and their Saints Days," Lavi said with a look around. There were clergy interspersed in the crowd, some of them spangled enough to look quite important for such a small church. "But I thought you said things had mysteriously toned down?"

Lenalee swallowed a mouthful of porridge slurped straight from the bowl and washed it down with coffee. "That's what I was told," she said. She turned an incredulous look on Lavi. "This doesn't look like a community with an opium problem, does it?"

"Well, this is a _church_," Lavi said, putting his hands on the stone floor behind him and leaning back. "I don't imagine the good times promised by volunteering to set up for a St. Queen of the Universe Party appeal to your average junkie."

Lenalee laughed into her hand. "I suppose not." She downed the rest of her coffee and asked, "Maybe we should wait in the atrium?"

"Sounds like a plan," Lavi said and handed Lenalee his bowl and drinking jar as she stood and headed back toward the kitchen.

When passersby through the atrium actually noticed them, they looked like they were observing refugees. Lenalee was starting to feel viscerally awkward while she and Lavi sat on a bench against the wall, probably looking like foreigners and, less forgivably, Protestants. To make matters worse, one of the more bedecked clergymen overheard Lavi say something about "Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence," and faster than Lenalee could say _righteous indignation_, they had worn through their welcome.

Lenalee pulled Lavi by his sleeve out of the atrium and into the sun, muttering, "I was _hoping_ we could find some way to pay them back."

They stood on the street, blinking in the morning light, which was quite a shock after the dim, dusty church interior. "I don't think they were _that_ mad," Lavi said, adjusting his collar from where Lenalee had shifted it with her tugging.

"Did you see that priest's face?" Lenalee demanded, putting her fists against her hips. Her suitcase dangled from her right hand, and it thudded against her thigh.

Lavi gave her a dismissive wave. "They're Catholic. They always look like that."

"I swear!" she huffed. "For someone in the Black Order, you sure have a lot to say about the Church."

Lavi shrugged.

Lenalee was not satisfied with that answer, particularly since Lavi couldn't even muster a apologetic expression, but she had other matters to worry about—matters that weren't as futile as trying to wring contrition from her partner. Lenalee knew that their next step was to meet up with those missing finders. Short of walking through the streets looking for a couple of guys in robes with big packs on their backs, their only option was to wait at the church. So wait they did.

They found a bench outside a general store across the street from the church, and they sat where they could watch the men and women coming and leaving the square. For as busy as the church had been, the street seemed disproportionately sparse. An open-air market on the opposite side of the square had attracted a small crowd of women with shopping baskets, and a group of scruffy-looking children seemed to be skirting a perimeter around the two weird-looking tourists warming a bench; otherwise, the street was clear.

"It's certainly no cultural hub," Lavi remarked, rubbing his chin, "but this isn't the kind of ghost town you find along opium trade routes."

Indeed, there were no gaunt, indolent bodies lingering in derelict doorways. There were no women of questionable professions hanging out of windows or sashaying about. No one looked to be starving in the street. Really, no one looked to be doing anything in the street save the children who were now shooting marbles in the middle of the packed-earth lane.

After about fifteen minutes, Lavi got bored and went to try his hand, first, at communicating with the passel of children and, second, at a match of marbles. Lenalee watched him with a certain degree of amazement as he managed to gesture, babble, and charm his way into a round. He looked absurd, then, crouched down in a circle, all knees and elbows and big, goofy grin.

With a sigh, Lenalee turned back to watch the front door to the church. She had, it seemed, refocused her attention just in time. A pair of men in brown robes with big, square packs on their backs were approaching St. Matthias, speaking to one another in low voices. One of the men was tall and sinewy with limp-looking fair hair while the other was broader and more square, his thick, dark hair pulled back in a queue at the base of his skull.

Lenalee shot to her feet, suitcase in hand, and ran toward the finders, arms waving.

"There you are!" she cried, charging toward them. Both men jumped and looked toward her. When they saw who was shouting for them, they both eased a little. "I'm so sorry we missed you last night!" Lenalee said as she skidded to a halt before the men. "Our ferry ran aground, and we had to wait, like, four hours to get here."

"Oh, no," said the fair haired finder. "You were on _that_ ferry?" He turned to the other finder. "I _told_ you were should have waited." The shorter finder looked embarrassed. "We gave up and went home after dark," he explained and began to apologize, but Lenalee put a hand to stop him.

"No, it's okay," she said, "We got a room at the church." She then introduced herself and "that big child over there" with a gesture toward Lavi.

"This is Giorgio Pasquale," the tall finder said and motioned to his swarthy partner. He then put his hand to his own sternum. "I'm Bill."

"Nice to meet you," Lenalee said, trying not to laugh at the very odd pair before her. "What do you say we find some place to sit down and go over particulars?"


	5. Fear and Suspicion

**A/N:** Longest chapter yet. If you're interested, there are some videos of people speaking Maltese on Youtube. It really is a beautiful language. Because I know y'all are smart cookies, I'll go ahead and admit that the first lobotomies (if you can even call them that) were performed in 1888, quite a few years after this is ostensibly set. Sorry 'bout that. You'll know what I'm talking about halfway through. As far as I know, my Maltese is accurate, but don't go checking it and making me look bad. :D Once more, Lavi does not cut the Church very much slack.

* * *

**V. Fear & Suspicion**

Giorgio, they learned, was a native of Malta, having gone to work for the Black Order in Rome a few years back. He was assigned to this case for obvious reasons, and when he led Lavi, Lenalee, and Bill to a small corner pub, he ordered drinks for all of them in polite, cheerful Maltese. Bill, on the other hand, had had his name drawn out of a hat like most finders.

They settled around a scrubbed wooden table that was just a touch too low for Bill and Lavi to sit comfortably, exorcists on one side and finders on the other. A server came over to their table before long and laid out four tall glasses of honey-colored water with ice. _Ruggata_, Giorgio explained, was chilled, diluted almond syrup, a Maltese classic.

"I didn't realize you were on the ferry that wrecked," Bill said after taking a long sip off his drink. "All the ferries yesterday were canceled. I thought you were stuck in Sicily for the night."

"Nope," Lavi said, trying to adjust his legs without banging his knees into the table. "We managed to snag the last room at St. Matthias."

"I'm surprised they let you," Giorgio said, his English as casual as his Maltese. "The Bishop would not understand the two of you traveling alone."

"As a matter of fact," Lavi began, but Lenalee stomped his toe hard.

"We made do," she said, beaming. Lenalee was growing a little weary of the chatting, so she plowed on ahead. "So, from my understanding, we're here to look into the smuggling situation. Is that correct?"

"It is," said Bill. He folded his elbows on the table and hunched forward a little. "The circumstances are really strange. Most of the people coming into Malta are tourists, you know. There certainly have been cases of people emigrating illegally but rarely the reverse."

"Have you had an opportunity to interview anyone in custody?" Lavi asked.

Bill shook his head. "No, almost everyone has been deported back to the mainland, and the few who are still around... well, let's just say you need fancier clearance than a couple of finders have to get in."

Lenalee furrowed her brow. "Are we going to be able to meet with them?"

"That all depends on how well Chief Komui has pulled those strings," Bill answered.

"I'm more concerned," Giorgio pressed, sitting forward in his seat, "About the dwindling interest in the Saints Days celebrations." Lenalee noticed the way the wooden crucifix around Giorgio's neck clapped against his chest when he moved. "I first alerted the Black Order about this long before the smuggling ships were intercepted." He noticed the somewhat unenthusiastic looks of his colleagues. "You see, there are only seven churches across the island that host the Feast of the Ascension. They are called the _Seba' Santa Marijiet_. Qrendi is one of them. In the past, Qrendi has been flooded with visitors here for the celebration."

"But the lady at the church told us we shouldn't look for hotel rooms last night because they would all be packed," Lavi interjected.

"That may be so," Giorgio went on, "But it does not take very much to book every hotel room in Qrendi."

"Where do people usually stay then?" Lenalee asked.

"Last year the church hosted three hundred pilgrims," Giorgio said.

"_Three hundred_?" Lavi exclaimed. "Where the hell did they put them all?"

"The nave," Giorgio said. "More pilgrims camped in the courtyard. They covered the fields south of town in tents. They stayed where they could. If you were here on this very day last year, we would not be able to sit in this pub. You would have had to sleep outside last night unless someone volunteered their home to you." His face became stern, frightened even. "I do not think you understand the gravity of this change. This time last year, you would not have been able to walk down the streets of Qrendi, they would be so crowded. The Maltese are a Catholic people. Something is happening here. Something is happening in Qrendi to drive pilgrims into the other parishes. Something is terribly wrong."

Lenalee and Lavi exchanged a look. Clearly, this was a personal matter for Giorgio.

"I think we should start with talking to the people taken off those ships," Lenalee said.

"All right," Lavi said with finality. "Bill and I will go to the police headquarters and talk to the people in custody. Lenalee, you and Giorgio can start asking around here. We'll meet back at the church in, say, two hours?"

x

x

x

The hitch that Lavi and Bill immediately ran into was actually getting into the police station. Lavi had decided to question the people in custody himself because he had a working grasp of Arabic, which would certainly be necessary to speak to the people taken off a ship from Tunisia, and while Arabic would get his questions answered, he and Bill could not cobble together enough Maltese to get past the stubborn officer at the front desk.

Lavi and Bill retreated into the foyer of the police station to come up with a plan. Lavi suggested they get themselves thrown into a holding cell by pretending to brawl in a pub somewhere, but Bill looked rather pale at the notion. Just as Lavi was kind of beginning to get into the idea, a voice from behind them called out, "Exorcist? Finder?"

They looked back to see a small, dark-haired woman in uniform approaching them. She came up to just below Lavi's chin and walked in short, clipped steps. "From Black Order?" she asked, her English choppy.

"Yes, we are," Lavi answered.

"I expect you," she said. "Come."

Bill gave a long sigh of relief and fell in line behind Lavi and this woman. She showed them around the front desk, giving the officer there a rapid-fire Maltese explanation, and into a back hallway. The room she took them to was small with whitewashed walls and a long square table in the middle. She gestured for them to sit, and she stood by the door.

"I bring man from ship here," she said, pointing toward the chair opposite Lavi and Bill. She then held up her hand, extending her all her fingers. "Five minutes," she said firmly. "Understand?"

"Yes. Five minutes," Lavi answered, and the woman left. Once she was gone and her footfalls no longer sounded in the hall, Lavi leaned over to Bill and muttered. "That's a little weird, don't you think? I mean, Chief Komui was able to get us in here, but he couldn't finagle more than five minutes?"

"They don't want us poking around," Bill whispered back. "Maybe they don't want word getting out that the Black Order is investigating a problem?"

"I think they don't want to admit that there is a problem at all." This was starting to look more and more like something bigger, something organized. If the police were trying to ignore the issue, perhaps someone more influential than the Black Order was involved. This only seemed to affirm Lavi's opium theory.

The woman officer returned shortly after, leading a tall Tunisian man with a blank, almost glassy expression. He was in cuffs and wore what appeared to have once been an expensive, dark grey suit. Now, however, it looked rather like he had been living in it for some time. She pulled out a chair for him and pushed his shoulder until he sank down. She then turned to Lavi, showed him her five fingers once more. He nodded his understanding.

When the officer was gone and the door was closed behind her, Lavi turned to the Tunisian man. "_Good afternoon_," Lavi said in Arabic. He was aware that his knowledge of the language had been garnered from living in a series of Arabic-speaking countries and was, therefore, a hodgepodge of dialects. Whether Tunisian Arabic was in there, too, Lavi wasn't entirely sure. He tried his best, however, to be polite.

"_Good afternoon,_" the man replied, his face still a little slack.

"_What brings you to Malta?_" Lavi asked. He wasn't trying to be ironic, but it must have come off that way because the man began to laugh a loose, almost lazy laugh.

"_What brings anyone to Malta? The beach? The sea air?_"

Lavi furrowed his brow. "_You can't get those things back home?_"

The bitter laughter faded from the man's voice, and he dropped his eyes. "_What are you? Interpol? Or some Vatican Emissary?_"

Lavi wouldn't call himself an emissary per se. He did find it intriguing that the two authorities this man would expect to meet would be those. Lavi laughed, "_Do I look like I'm from Interpol?_"

The man eyed him. "_Then where?_"

Lavi hesitated. "_Somewhere else,_" was all he offered.

The man stared at him, the light dimmed behind his heavily lidded, dark eyes. It was possible, Lavi thought, that his stint in jail was really taking its toll on this guy, but something about the Tunisian man, something about his posture, his dull eyes, struck Lavi as more profound. He knew he had seen that look before. It was a look of emptiness, almost soullessness. Lavi sat back and rubbed his chin.

"_Is it opium?_"

The man laughed again, a derisive laugh, and the longer it went on, the more despondent his face became. Lavi realized then that this man was not laughing at him nor was he laughing at the pale, quaking Bill. "_Opium?_" the man asked. He bared his straight, white teeth. "_I envy the man who has sold his soul to opium._"

Lavi recognized it then, where he had seen that look. During a brief stay in Neuchatel, Switzerland with Bookman, quite a few years in the past, Lavi had snuck off one morning and paid a penny to take a stroll down the halls of Prefargier Asylum. Unlike many of the other boys creeping around the corridor that day, Lavi had not brought a stick with which to poke the incurables as they slumped in their seats, oozing lobotomy wounds across their shaven heads.

This look, as though whoever was living behind this man's eyes had simply packed his things and left, was disconcerting on two counts: there is very little more frightening than a living dead man, and Lavi began to question the Tunisian's reliability.

"_So who owns your soul, sir?_" Lavi asked.

The Tunisian leapt to his feet, wrenching at the handcuffs. Both Lavi and Bill jumped up as well, their chairs clattering to the ground. Lavi instinctively shoved Bill behind him and dropped his right hand to his hammer, strapped to his leg. He winced inwardly; Innocence was not meant to be used on men.

"_You're a child!_" the Tunisian roared at Lavi. He flung himself forward against the table. "_What do you know of anything? Of life? Of what would drive a man to—_"

Two officers burst into the room then, the door hitting the wall with an echoing bang. They rushed past Lavi and Bill and restrained the Tunisian man. He began to fight their grip on him, letting his weight sag to the floor then putting out his feet then throwing himself from side to side. They dragged him, though, past Lavi and Bill and out the door into the hall. The Tunisian man's bellow at Lavi must have depleted the vitality he had left because, as the officers forcibly removed him, he let his mouth sag open. He released moan after long, mournful moan. They came from deep in his chest, from the seat of where a normal man's soul would be, and as he was taken down the hall, his moans lingered long after he was gone.

A trembling hand fell on Lavi's arm, and he turned to see Bill, ashen and wide-eyed. "Can we leave? Please?"

x

x

x

The sun was high and unashamed when Lenalee found Lavi sitting on the stoop outside St. Matthias. She and Giorgio noticed Lavi from some distance away, but Bill was no where to be seen. Lenalee didn't think much of this until she drew closer and saw the way Lavi was sitting, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped before his mouth. He sat with his right shoulder to them, showing only his eyepatch.

"Is everything all right?" Lenalee called as she and Giorgio approached.

Lavi looked up at her, and for just a moment, she could see the line between his brows, the wide white of his one eye. Then he was grinning and rising to his feet. "Everything's okay here," he replied.

"Where's Bill?" Giorgio asked.

Lavi jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. "He's inside, having girltalk with God. I think he was a little shaken up by the nut job we talked to at the precinct," he said. "Considering I was talking to the guy in a language ol' Bill doesn't speak, it really got to him."

If Giorgio didn't appreciate the girltalk comment, he did not show it. Instead, he shifted his eyes toward the entrance to the church. "I will speak to him," he said and left Lenalee's side. Lavi watched him go, tried to catch a glimpse of the interior of the atrium, although he knew Bill was probably hunkered down in pew, out of sight from the door.

Her partner seemed off. Lenalee watched him a moment, his arms hanging motionlessly at his side. "Lavi," she started, the beginnings of concern in her voice.

He whipped his head around toward her. "So, the guy I talked to said it wasn't opium," Lavi said. "He said he envied the man hooked on opium."

Lenalee resolved then that if Lavi wanted to pretend that he was fine then she could, too. For the time being at least. "Wow," she said, "That's quite a thing to say." She glanced around and took a step closer to Lavi. "I heard something similar from some of the people I spoke to."

"Really?" Lavi asked, "How has this not become big frigging news yet?"

"Well," Lenalee went on, "I was also told that there's no problem at all. And I probably heard everything in between." Lavi gave her a confused look, but she wasn't entirely comfortable elaborating in the street. "Giorgio showed me where our hotel reservations are. I'm going to tell him to meet us there later." She disappeared inside the church for just a moment, emerged with their luggage in hand, and started down the lane.

They walked a few blocks toward the south, entering an area of town where the buildings were taller and more uniform. Their hotel was a long, flat-faced structure with pale stucco and fresh blue paint on the shutters. There were three rows of windows on the front, the ground floor row having wider, taller panes. Lavi held the door open for her, and they walked together toward the reception desk. A bald-headed man smiled up at them from a stool behind the desk and asked them something in Maltese.

Lenalee smiled apologetically and shook her head. She held up two fingers on her right hand and said, "Giorgio Pasquale?"

The man asked another question then another and then seemed to understand what Lenalee meant. "Aaah," he said as he pulled out his ledger. He flipped the tome open, ran his index finger down a list in the far left column. "_Hawn, Giorgio Pasquale_," the man said. He then opened a drawer in the desk and produced two iron keys. "_S__ebgha_," he said and handed Lenalee a key. It had a tag with the number seven on it. He then passed eight to Lavi and said, "_Tmienja_." He smiled, nodded, and gestured toward the right of the desk where the room opened into what appeared to be dining room. Beyond that was a flight of stairs leading upward.

"_Grazzi hafna,_" Lenalee replied with a bow and started toward the stairs.

Lavi walked to her right and teased, "Lookit you, Miss I-Speak-Maltese-Now."

Lenalee laughed. "Giorgio thought I should at least know how to say thank you."

They came to the top of the stairs and took a right down a hall with doors on either side. The brass numbers on the door, fortunately, matched the numerals on their keys. Lenalee's room was on the right, and just a few feet down on the left was Lavi's room.

"So," he said, spinning his key around the last knuckle of his index finger. "Your place or mine?"

Lenalee rolled her eyes and unlocked the door to room number seven. Lavi followed her in, looking a little dejected that she couldn't even pretend to giggle. While the room was not too much larger than their room at the church, it certainly was more hospitable. There was a landscape painting on the wall by the door, two pillows on the considerable bed, and the room came with it own imposing wooden crucifix mounted to the right of the bureau.

Lavi tossed his luggage down and went to pull the drapes across the small window before he sank to Lenalee's bed. "So aside from Maltese, what did you learn?"

Lenalee set her suitcase on the bureau, turned, and leaned back against the edge. "Well, either the devil has taken up residence here and is trying to lure us all to perdition or there's nothing wrong and how dare I ask such a rude question." Lavi snorted. "A few people were willing to be rational with me, and I heard something that might be of use to us. Apparently, there's a new doctor in town."

"Doctor?" Lavi asked.

"Yeah," Lenalee replied. "I can't remember what it was in Maltese, but Giorgio told me that it meant Heart Doctor or Spirit Doctor or something like that."

"Spirit Doctor? Where do you s'pose he got his license to practice?" Lavi asked sarcastically.

"And," Lenalee continued, "he's gotten really popular lately. A few people think he can cure just about anything. Somebody told me that he can grant wishes. Most anyone who would talk about him, though, said he's just good at giving people what they want." She shrugged. "I didn't ask anyone pointblank about drugs, though. Giorgio was translating everything for me, and I thought it would make him uncomfortable."

Lavi pictured the terror on Bill's face at the precinct and thought dryly, _Oh, we wouldn't want Giorgio to be uncomfortable. _"Well, I don't think that's the case anymore," Lavi said. "The guy I talked to may have been bat-shit crazy, but I think he meant it when he said opium wasn't involved."

"What makes you think he was crazy?" Lenalee asked.

"It was his eyes," Lavi said. He suppressed a shudder. "Like a dead man's. Like he'd just sort of switched off the light." He made a flicking gesture near his right temple. "He also tried to attack Bill and me," he added.

Lenalee jumped to her feet. "_What?_" she demanded.

"Oh," Lavi grinned sheepishly, "I didn't mention that before?"

"No, you didn't _mention_ that! No wonder Bill was so shaken up!" She crossed her arms over her chest. "Why did he attack you? Did you provoke him, Lavi?"

Lavi looked rather hurt. "No, I did not, thank you very much. He said he envied the man who's sold his soul to opium, and I asked, and I quote, _so, who owns your soul, sir?_ I even said _sir_!"

Lenalee looked thoughtful. "You must have really hit a nerve."

"Yeah," he said, his voice dropping. "He called me a child. Said I didn't know anything about life." Lavi blew out a sigh and cast his gaze to the side. He shook his head. "It was weird. The guy just snapped."

Lenalee watched her partner a moment. His shoulders were slumped forward a degree, his hands hanging between his knees. She remembered then the way he looked when she found him outside the church. And she understood. Lenalee crossed the distance between them quickly and sat to Lavi's left. "Sounds pretty intense," she said, watching his eye, waiting for him to meet her gaze.

"I've seen Akuma with more life in them than that guy," Lavi muttered. He watched his hands a moment longer before straightening his back and looking at Lenalee. "The police were pretty weird, too," he added.

The change of subject certainly seemed to improve his spirits, Lenalee thought. "What about them was weird?"

"They were expecting us," Lavi said. "Which, I s'pose, isn't all that unusual, but even though they let us in to speak with the detainee, they gave us five minutes. The officer was pretty strict about that, too."

Lenalee put a finger on her chin. "That's odd. I wonder what they're hiding." She thought a moment longer but stopped herself before she could get too lost in conjecture. "Well, I think the next step is to find the Doctor. A lady told us that his shop was in the southern part of town, near the ocean." Lenalee reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "It's called _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr_," she read from the sheet.

Lavi looked about half confused and half impressed. "Gesundheit?"

Lenalee laughed. "_Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr_," she repeated. She showed him the piece of paper. "Giorgio wrote down the pronunciation for me right here. He said it means _get well soon._"


	6. Vulnerability

**A/N: **Thanks, y'all.

* * *

**VI. Vulnerability**

The earth beneath them had turned sandy as Lenalee and Lavi traveled south on foot. They were, perhaps, a mile or so from Qrendi's precipitous, rocky shore, and the gusts that blew in hot and dry had a sea-tang to them. Around them, buildings over a single story became more and more scarce, the spaces between buildings became bigger, grassier. Gnarled, wind-stunted trees cropped up along the side of the road, and grey-green, scrubby shrubs with little clusters of yellow flowers grew out of rocky shoulders.

Lavi walked with his fingers laced and his hands behind his head. "Are you sure you know where you're going?" he asked. Over the rolling, cultivated hills off to their right, the sun was creeping ever closer to the horizon. They still had many hours of daylight left, certainly, but if they got lost, Lavi was pretty certain that Lenalee did not know enough Maltese to get them to the hotel, and he certainly wasn't feeling up for another raucous round of charades with pointing and laughing locals even if it would get them back.

Lenalee squinted at the map the Giorgio had drawn for her. "It should be," she began, looked up, back down at the map, and up again. "Down that alley there." She pointed toward a side road cutting through a small grouping of shops.

They turned right down a lane that was wide enough for only one carriage to pass. Fortunately, the few people they met were on foot.

The area they were in certainly didn't strike Lavi as a dangerous part of town, which, after his interaction with the Tunisian man in jail, was what he was anticipating. Lavi felt rather helpless when he looked up at the big, hand-painted signs on the front of the shops. It did not take long, however, for Lenalee to find a promising one. She held up the piece of paper with _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr _written on it and checked it against the sign. All the letters seemed to match up, and they walked through the front door of a small shop with a little green awning over the door. The two windows on the front were covered with green, translucent curtains, and a bell over the entrance tinkled when Lavi held the door open for Lenalee.

The air inside was cool and still, and the shop struck both Lavi and Lenalee as blindingly dark compared to the afternoon sun in the street. They lingered by the door a moment, blinking and trying to adjust.

As the dim receded, Lenalee could make out a front desk with a cash register directly in front of the entrance. There was a doorway behind the desk, but a heavy, dark curtain over the passage blocked it off. To the right and left, the room opened outward, the ceiling rising a foot or so higher. The extra altitude, Lenalee thought, must have been to accommodate all the shelves. The perimeter of the floor was lined with closed cabinets that rose to hip-level, and above that, the walls were all shelves. The two farthest walls had little, rectangular windows near the ceiling that let in powdery yellow light, making the dancing motes in the air wink.

Lavi wandered off to the right, leaving Lenalee at the desk. There was a step down into this part of the store, and Lavi found himself moving slowly, carefully into the room. Something about the stoic faces of the bottles, all brown, all in neat rows with neat square labels on them, felt similar to St. Matthias, but this place compelled Lavi to be quieter, more still. He approached one wall, eyed the shelf. The bottles were organized by size, none of them larger than a few ounces. Lavi reached up and plucked a bottle off the shelf. It was heavier than he expected. Liquid sloshed inside. She squinted at the label. At the top, it had something written in a language Lavi did not recognize, and below that was the word _RESIGNATION. _Below that was another word—it looked like Italian, perhaps—and below that was Arabic. Lavi then realized that he was holding a bottle labeled in four different languages. He furrowed his brow and put the bottle back.

He heard voices behind him and turned. In his distraction, he had not noticed Lenalee ding the bell on the desk. A Maltese man had come up to the desk, and was chatting with Lenalee in English. Lavi headed back toward the desk, and the Maltese man saw him approach before Lenalee did.

The man looked to be young, perhaps in his early thirties, and he was, Lavi noted grudgingly, rather good-looking. His black hair was short and kempt, his brows dark and expressive. He smiled a not entirely sincere smile at Lavi and said, "Good afternoon, sir."

Lenalee turned as Lavi came up to her right. "Oh, Lavi," she said, "I was just talking to this man here. He says this is his shop."

"So you're the Spirit Doctor?" Lavi asked.

The man laughed. "Is that what they call me now?" he asked. "One week I am Lucifer, the next I am a miracle worker."

"What do you call you?"

He smiled again at Lavi. "The same thing my mother called me: Karmenu."

"Well, Mr. Karmenu," Lavi said, dropping his right elbow on the desk and leaning against it, "Somebody told me that you can grant wishes."

"That all depends on what you're wishing for, sir," Karmenu answered. "If you wish for fame, I cannot give you that. If you wish for money, I cannot give you that either. If you wish for women," he paused and glanced at Lenalee, "though I don't suppose you'd be wishing for that, would you?"

Lenalee blushed. Lavi was too curious to cash in on this opportunity to embarrass his partner, so he said instead, "What _can_ you give me, then?"

Karmenu eyed Lavi for a moment. "What does a man really want when he says he wants wings?"

The mysticism was getting a little old for Lavi. "I'm guessing it's not ease of transportation."

"Freedom," Lenalee chimed in. Karmenu had charmed her, Lavi thought, glancing at her as she stepped closer to the counter. She set her pale fingers on the counter. "He wants freedom."

"Ah," Karmenu put up his index finger and smiled. "That is correct, young miss. And that is most fortunate for me as it seems only God can give you wings. I, however, can give you freedom," he said and then added, "For a nominal fee, of course."

"And if I wanted fame?" Lavi asked.

If Karmenu was irritated to have his attention taken from Lenalee, he did not show it. "I would give you a sense of importance," he said to Lavi.

"And money?" Lavi persisted.

"I would give you abundance."

"And women?"

Karmenu laughed then. "That is a tricky one, sir. There are only so many desires fulfilled by wings, but women, well, that is more complicated isn't it?" Karmenu paused, observed Lavi's reaction, his closed off, suspicious face. "Or perhaps for some of us it is not?"

"What's in those bottles?" Lavi asked when Karmenu seemed to be stepping toward a conversation Lavi was not interested in having. "I saw one that said resignation on it. What does that mean?"

Karmenu held up his hand as though he were pinching a saucer and made the motion of squeezing a dropper over it. "Three drops in a cup of tea, sir, for a man seeking a profound experience. For you, I might say three drops directly to the tongue."

Part of Lavi wanted to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean, but Lenalee stepped in. "You mean to say you sell bottles full of freedom and importance and abundance?"

Karmenu nodded. "Come and I'll show you," he said, waving Lenalee to follow him as he headed off to his right, toward the wing of the store Lavi had not seen yet. Karmenu lead them into the opened room, warned them of the step down, and brought Lenalee over to the corner, Lavi grudgingly following. "This," he said, taking a bottle down, resting it in his palm, and showing it to Lenalee, "is fulfillment. A few drops of this and you will crawl into your bed this night feeling as though you got done everything you needed to do today." He put the bottle back and brought down another. "And this is belonging. It will make you feel at home where ever you are." He made a broad gesture with his arms. "This side is for people seeking happiness and love. The other side is for people seeking fear and grief."

"Grief?" Lenalee asked. "Why on earth would someone want grief?"

Karmenu laughed and headed back toward the front desk, his two customers in tow. "You are so young, miss." Lavi was immediately reminded of the Tunisian man at the precinct, and he did not like the association at all. "Grief is a sanctuary," Karmenu went on. "Within grief, it is safe to grieve. There are no complications. There is no analysis to be had. I offer the purest of feelings, before loss becomes blame or grief becomes guilt, a place where one can simply hold her pain in her hands and speak to it." Karmenu cupped his hands before Lenalee. "Tell me, young miss, has there never been a time when you wished you could allow yourself to grieve?"

Lavi watched this exchange, feeling like something cold and heavy was sliding down his throat into his stomach. Lenalee was gazing up at Karmenu, and Lavi felt torn between his wrenching sympathy for her and his indignation toward this salesman who was manipulating her. It jumbled together in the end, and Lavi put a hand on Lenalee's back between her shoulder blades if only to keep himself from swinging at Karmenu. Lenalee jumped a little and looked up at him, her eyes too big and too bright.

Lavi watched her face for just a moment, tried to read her eyes. There were too many layers to interpret with an audience, but on the surface, Lavi could see her entreating him. "Thanks for your time, Karmenu," Lavi said, starting to steer Lenalee to the door.

Karmenu smiled a sage sort of smile. "Of course," he said. "I will see you again soon."

Lavi opened the door, pushed Lenalee out it, and gave Karmenu a last, minatory look over his shoulder before following Lenalee into the sun. She moved stiffly, her hands close to her chest and her eyes cast down. She stood in the lane, watching Lavi as he closed the door behind him and came out to join her.

He thrust his hands into his pockets. "That guy was full of shit," he snapped.

He could feel Lenalee's eyes on him. He couldn't quite meet them, though. Instead, he slung an arm around her shoulders and started down the lane toward the main road. They moved in silence for a time, Lenalee bumping against his side. "I shouldn't have let him get to me," she muttered, clearly chagrined with herself.

"No, you shouldn't have," Lavi answered. He felt her go rigid under his arm. "But he was a really good salesman."

Lenalee stopped in the road, and Lavi was pulled to a stop by his arm around her. "Do you think he meant it?" she asked, her voice a touch shrill.

"Meant what? To exploit your feelings?" He shifted a glare toward the shop.

"No, Lavi," Lenalee said, exasperated, "The bottles! The bottled emotions! Clearly there are people here who really buy what he's doing."

Lavi thought once more of the Tunisian man. He wished he had had the chance to speak to someone else, preferably someone not hand-picked by the police. It was entirely possible, Lavi thought, that the police would show him the craziest person pulled off the boat in order to upset the investigation.

A pair of women had appeared at the entrance to the lane, walking shoulder to shoulder, and Lavi stepped to the side preemptively. Lenalee followed him, the searching, strained look on her face remaining as she moved.

"I think," Lavi said, "he's got his store divided up into two sections for a reason."

"Well, yeah," Lenalee said, "Happy and sad emo—"

"Stimulants and depressants," Lavi interrupted. "I think some people take the happy drops and, because they expect to be made happy, they interpret whatever they experience as happiness. I think Karmenu knows just how impressionable your average joe is, and he plays on that."

Lenalee's mouth slackened a little, and her brow furrowed. It was the look she gave him, Lavi knew, when she wasn't buying his story. It was part disappointment and part skepticism. "I guess so," she said. Her voice lifted just a degree when she said, "That would explain why not everyone has the same experience. Maybe some customers are more gullible than others."

"Exactly," Lavi said. He looked to his right and left before leaning toward Lenalee and whispering, "I know a way for us to find out."

Lenalee sensed the conspiratorial tone in his voice and leaned in as well. "How?"

Lavi pulled one of his hands from his pocket and revealed a half-ounce brown bottle. He cupped it in his palm between them and grinned. "I swiped this while he was giving you the pitch."

Lenalee gasped and quickly curled Lavi's fingers back over the bottle before anyone else could see. "You stole that?" she hissed.

"He won't miss it," Lavi said dismissively. "If this guy is really the reason rich foreigners are sneaking into Malta, he doesn't need our business. Plus, I don't want to support his scheme." He looked around once more and thrust the bottle back into his pocket.

"What feeling was it?" Lenalee asked.

"Affection."

"Affection? Is that like the affection you feel for a pet cat or the affection you feel when you hold someone's hand?" That seemed little a rather significant difference to Lenalee.

Lavi shrugged. "Maybe it will feel like you've got a cat in one arm and your boyfriend in the other." He acted out tucking a squirming cat under his left arm and holding hands with his other.

Lenalee smiled, and Lavi felt quite a bit of relief.

It was short lived, however. A throat-tearing scream sounded from behind Lavi, and he spun around in time to see that the pair of women were now level with him and Lenalee. One of the women had flung herself to the ground, throwing her arm before her face and gapping in terror. The other woman was doubled forward, her back swelling and rippling as though something gestating in her was pushing to get out.

Lavi leapt out of the road, shielding Lenalee and pinning her to the wall of a shop when the woman's back burst with shreds of her dress and flesh like confetti. A hulking, grey shape was borne from her body, which went slack and deflated.

"I was wondering when we would run into one of these bastards," Lavi snarled, a malicious sort of smile on his face.

The Akuma squeezed its way out of the woman and began to rise, it's expressionless eyes trained down on Lavi where he was hunched down over Lenalee. Lavi felt the head of his hammer under his fingers, but not in time. The Akuma fired a shot at them. Lavi cinched his arms around his partner. He threw them both to the packed earth, and they tumbled into the road.

"Protect that woman," Lenalee commanded, pointing toward the paralyzed woman, slumped on the ground to their right. Without waiting for a response from Lavi, Lenalee leapt into the air, green fire dancing around her ankles like fluttering wings.

Lavi hardily had time to snatch the fallen woman from the road and move her off to the side before Lenalee had sunk the heel of her right boot through the crown of the Akuma as it tried to track her, firing shots almost randomly.

The Akuma crumpled and collapsed like a paper balloon under Lenalee. And as fast as it had begun, it was over. Her impossibly long legs were illuminated, and Lavi caught himself appreciating them. For their lethality, he told himself. He turned back to the woman he was supposed to be defending.

"Are you all right?" he asked, taking the woman by the shoulders and helping her to lean against the wall.

The woman clearly had not the tolerance for Akuma that Lavi and Lenalee had. She also did not speak English. She shoved Lavi off her and shouted fast, terrified words at him that he could not understand. Lavi stepped back and put up his hands, but the woman was not assuaged. She shrieked in Maltese at him, pointed at the fallen Akuma, and turned. She fled, stumbling over her own feet as she went. Lavi started after her, took two running strides, but stopped. There was no point. What would he do when he caught her? Try to mime out an explanation?

Instead, Lavi turned to Lenalee, who was dabbing at sweat on her brow with her sleeve.

"Nice work, Lenalee, as always," Lavi said as he dusted himself off.

She reached up and brushed the backs of her fingers over Lavi's left shoulder, swiping away a pale, brown smudge. "Thanks," she said. She gave him a sad sort of smile. "You know, it had been so long since I'd seen one of those things, I was starting to believe that this might really be a vacation."

"Maybe Malta actually is paradise," Lavi offered, grinning.

Lenalee laughed a short, bitter sort of laugh. "Or maybe most people here are religious enough to know better than to challenge death." Lenalee allowed her Innocence to deactivate, and the dancing flames around her ankles went out.

"Do you think he was here just to mess with people, or..." Lavi looked over at the entrance to _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr. _

Lenalee followed his gaze. "Or, do I think there's Innocence around here?" she finished for him.

Lavi pulled the little brown bottle from his pocket once more, cradled it in his palm. He looked up from his stolen quarry and met Lenalee's dark, apprehensive eyes. "There's one way to find out."


	7. Affection

**A/N: **Hope everyone has had a safe, fun holiday. I, personally, have had a delightfully hedonistic Saturnalia. Anyway. Two things: first, Toshe is pronounced _TOH-shuh_, and second, um, trust me. I know how easy it is not to trust amateur authors, but do give it a try now. Much will be revealed and, consequently, repaired in the next chapter.

* * *

**VII. Affection**

The dining area was crowded when Lavi and Lenalee returned to their hotel. It was nearing five o'clock, and the other guests were gathering around the three long tables as a rather frantic-looking young Maltese woman brought out wooden bowls of rice and vegetables to patrons. The man at the front desk looked up and waved at the exorcists when they came in, calling out a cheerful "_Hawn!_" to them. Both Lenalee and Lavi felt that their nerves were a touch ragged after their afternoon, and the warm domesticity of the little inn was quite welcome. Unbeknownst to the other, both Lavi and Lenalee wondered if this was what Karmenu's belonging elixir felt like.

Giorgio and Bill were sitting at the end of one table, as close to a corner as they could, their backs to the wall, and Giorgio rose to his feet and waved at Lavi and Lenalee when they came in. Lavi gave a quite wave of recognition back, and he and his partner began weaving through the other guests toward their table, where the finders waited with two empty bowls before them. There were quite a few children darting around their feet. Lavi made an effort to avoid them at first, but for all his precision with his hammer, this was like trying to swim through a tub of puppies without getting kicked. He let one boy collide, headlong into his left leg and fall into a whinging pile onto the floor, and after that, the children made a greater effort to avoid Lavi. Lenalee stayed close behind, moving in his wake.

"We were afraid we had lost you," Giorgio said, smiling. He gestured for the two exorcists to take seats and then waved down the server.

"Can you tell her I want a beer? Something dark?" Lavi asked. Giorgio gave him a look Lavi could not quite interpret but agreed. He and the server exchanged some quick words, and she hurried off. Giorgio turned back to his colleagues and looked them over furtively.

"Are you well?" he asked.

Lavi put his hands in his pockets and leaned back in his chair. He felt his knees bump and his feet hit the table legs as he stretched them out. "We met the Spirit Doctor," he said.

"And?" Bill pressed, his pale eyes a little red.

"And we're skeptical," Lenalee answered. "I want to do more poking around before I pass judgment."

"I'm ready to pass judgment right now, actually," Lavi interjected. "I think the guy is a consummate con artist. He sells these tinctures that he claims can make you experience things like elation or grief or anything you can think of. And half this town is totally buying it."

Bill and Giorgio exchanged a glance. Lenalee noticed.

"What?" she asked. "Do you know something about it?"

Giorgio looked troubled when he cleared his throat and said, "We overheard something while at St. Matthias. Something we should not have heard." He clenched his jaw a moment, crossed himself—the motion was quick, a mere flicking of his wrist—and he went on. "A priest was speaking to a novice. This is... this is quite unorthodox. He should not have repeated what was confessed to him," he muttered. "He was speaking in Latin, and I didn't understand all of it. The priest spoke of going to police headquarters. He does this daily, you understand, to hear the confessions of anyone there. He said he spoke to the captain of the grounded ferry."

Lavi sat forward, intrigued. "_Our_ grounded ferry?"

The server then returned with two bowls and a sweating brown bottle. She set them down on the table and hurried away with a smile and a nod. Both Lenalee and Lavi tucked into their dinners without hesitation.

Giorgio waited for the girl to leave. "Yes," he answered at last. He looked around and lowered his voice. "The priest said the man was Sicilian. He was very upset, inconsolable even. They're charging him with negligence."

"Negligence?" Lenalee asked. "Was he drunk when we wrecked?"

"I do not know," Giorgio said. "I did not hear. The priest did say, however, that the captain told him that it had been so long since he'd tried it and he did not think this would happen."

Lavi swallowed a mouthful of beer and asked, "He said that?"

"Yes, I remember this distinctly. It had been so long since he'd tried it, and he did not think this would happen."

"Did he mention anything about a feeling? A specific feeling like freedom or resignation or anything?" Lavi asked.

Giorgio shook his head. "He might have, but I did not hear."

"Wait a second," Lenalee said, trying to rein in the conjecture. "He might have meant it had been so long since he had docked in Malta. Maybe he was out of practice?"

"There are only so many things you can do to get yourself charged with negligence," Lavi said, turning to Lenalee. "I'll bet you the rest of your stipend that Captain Negligence decided to celebrate his arrival in Malta with a shot of happy juice."

"That'd have to be pretty powerful happy juice," Bill remarked, "I mean to make a man do something that careless."

"We don't know what it is, but if our hunch is right, then this is the same stuff that is drawing people in from the mainland," Lenalee said. She saw Bill shudder slightly, almost imperceptibly. "This is starting to seem more and more like something illegal with every person I talk to."

They decided then that the next thing to do would be to interview the priest. Giorgio looked appalled that they would even suggest coercing a confessor into repeating what the captain had said, but Lenalee told him it had to be done. Lavi would have handled Giorgio's Catholic sensibilities with much less delicacy, but when he opened his mouth to say something unfriendly, Lenalee stomped on his toe hard. As Lavi yelped and whined, she ignored him and grinned apologetically at their translator.

Bill and Giorgio tossed down some coins and got up to leave as the dinner crowd was thinning. They were staying with Giorgio's cousin, Carmelo Pasquale, who lived a good walk north of town. As it was nearing dusk then, they decided to call it a night. They would all reconvene outside St. Matthias in the morning, they resolved, and they would go from there.

Lenalee listened to Giorgio swap words with the innkeeper at the reception desk before he and Bill left through the creaky front door. Once they were alone, Lavi tipped his beer up into his mouth, draining it completely, then put the bottle down hard.

"I think you broke my toe, Lenalee," he harped at her.

Lenalee glared. "Maybe next time you'll stop and think before you say something that might offend somebody! I swear, you interact with people like you swing that hammer of yours."

Lavi narrowed his eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means not everything is a big game of whack-a-mole," Lenalee said, throwing her hands into the air. "I know it's a stretch for you, but could you at least _attempt_ to have some tact?" Lavi scoffed. "Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension, so there're going to be a lot of people around who won't appreciate the jokes. So just," her shoulders sagged a little as though she were already resigning herself to a day full of Lavi's crap, "Just try not to get us kicked off the island."

He'd never been terribly good at saying no to that face, that do-it-for-me face. "For you, Lenalee," he began, "I'll stifle the rolling commentary."

She smiled at him gratefully. Just then, the server came up to their table and asked them something in Maltese. Lenalee looked to Lavi, who by day two, had proven he was much better at the miming and flailing than she. He put up two fingers and said, "Tea?"

The server nodded, gathered their bowls and Lavi's empty bottle, and swept off to the kitchen.

"Well, that was easy," Lavi said with a shrug.

A moment later, the young woman returned carrying two steaming tea cups in saucers. She set them down a little sloppily before Lavi and Lenalee, tea sloshing over the lip of the cups. She left and returned quickly with a small tin cup of cream and a glass jar of white sugar. Lavi watched Lenalee scoot herself and her saucer closer to him until her right knee was pressing into his left thigh. She clearly was expecting what he was expecting, so he pulled the little brown bottle from his pocket.

"Affection," Lenalee mused. "I've got to say..." She grinned a little mischievously, "I'm curious."

Lavi had not anticipated her being so enthusiastic. "Uh, Lenalee, have you ever, you know, _done_ anything before?" If he went on what he knew of her, Lavi thought it was safe to assume that she'd never even had wine before.

"No," she said, taking the bottle from his hand. Lavi shifted even closer to her, pressing his shoulder to her shoulder to better conceal what they were doing. Lenalee unscrewed the top of the bottle and loaded the dropper. "Karmenu said three drops, right?"

Lavi was getting apprehensive. "Why don't you do two? Or better yet, just one?"

"Why?" Lenalee asked.

Lavi blinked. He had thought that would be obvious. "Because you're small... and a girl."

Lenalee was clearly not amused by this, and she released one, two, three drops into her tea. Lavi sighed a defeated sort of sigh, took the bottle from her, and did the same to his tea. They didn't speak, both too nervous, as they cupped their hands around their steaming tea. Lavi watched Lenalee blow gently a few times at the steam, and simultaneously, they tipped their cups toward their mouths. Lavi expected at least some hint of the bitter bite of opium—he, unlike Lenalee, had once been a thirteen-year-old boy in and around the Golden Triangle, and, therefore, had an idea of what he was potentially getting into. But black tea with a pinch of affection tasted like black tea. It was, perhaps, sweeter. Not the static, dry hint of cane sugar, though. This was the complex, rolling sweetness of honey.

"Do you feel anything?" Lenalee asked.

Lavi looked down at himself, then into his tea cup, and then over to Lenalee. "Not a thing."

They took their time finishing their tea, checking in with one another between sips. But nothing happened and nothing happened. Lenalee tried her hand at tasseomancy to pass the time, peering into the dregs of Lavi's teacup and saying things like, "All I see are hammers." That parlor trick eventually lost appeal, though, and soon they were tossing a couple lira on the table and heading for the stairs. Night had settled already, thin and airy the way nights are by the sea.

Lenalee was two steps above Lavi and, perhaps, halfway up the stairs when she stumbled. Lavi caught her, his hands on her shoulders, and righted her. "You okay there?" he asked, laughing.

She put a hand to her head, and when Lavi set her up on her feet, she seemed to waver. "I just got kind of dizzy."

They lingered a moment on the stairs, Lavi keeping a grip on Lenalee until she got her weight under her and waved his hands away. "It's okay," she said, "It's passed."

Another dizzy spell struck her as she approached her hotel room door, and she sagged against the wall to her right. This time, Lavi joined her. He felt his own forehead, watched the hall twist one way and then the other. He squeezed his eye shut. "Just get your door open," he commanded Lenalee, who was stabbing her key in the direction of the lock but missing. "If I'm going to puke and pass out, I'm not doing it in public."

Lavi's wooziness passed before Lenalee's did, and in its place, he felt a tide of concern. This didn't feel like affection at all. He saw Lenalee try and fail to get the key in the lock once more, and, seizing his moment of lucidity, Lavi put his hand over hers and thrust the key in the lock himself. They turned it together, and Lenalee stumbled in, looking like a pretty, young drunk. She flopped onto the bed, face down, her arms tucked underneath her, and lay motionless.

When the hotel room began to swim in Lavi's vision, he collapsed onto the bed as well, but he managed to angle himself so that he was propped up on one of the pillows.

Soon, Lavi's dizziness subsided, and he was able to push himself up against the headboard. Once he was settle, Lavi was able to appreciate just what a terrible idea trying Karmenu's elixir had been. He unwound his scarf and unzipped the collar of his coat to try to get some air.

"Shit," he muttered, "Komui is going to kill me when he hears about this."

"What makes you think I'm going to tell Komui?" Lenalee grumbled, her face pressed to the blanket on the bed.

While this certainly was not becoming of either of them, Lavi was confident that the scolding Lenalee would receive would be nothing compared to the corporal punishment in store for him. He didn't feel much gratitude, though; he was quite preoccupied with watching Lenalee and waiting for her to give him some sign that he had not just facilitated her OD-ing on affection.

Suddenly, Lenalee rolled over and sat up. She whipped her head around to look at Lavi, her eyes wide with a sort of wonder. "Do you feel that?" she asked.

Lavi blinked and assessed. "Feel what?"

Lenalee's voice became airy, more distant. "It's like a..." her mouth moved but nothing came out. She looked away. "A sort of warmth." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Like someone's holding me."

Either she was high as a kite and really impressionable or this stuff was starting to kick in, Lavi thought. He watched her sort of snuggle down into herself, a dreamy smile on her face. And then it struck him as well. He felt the fear drain out of him.

"I don't know how to describe it," Lenalee went on. "I feel like... like everything's all right. Or it's going to be all right..."

The feeling settled around him like a mantle. Lavi knew exactly how to describe what he was experiencing. It felt like a grey morning in October. It felt like a small room with clean sheets, a fire lit, cedar logs burning. It felt like the quiet between assignments, sequestered away somewhere safe and simple. A cup of hot coffee. Curling his toes into thick carpet. A window seat on the last train home.

_Home?_

"Oh, Lavi," Lenalee breathed, putting her hands to her cheeks. "It's working... it's real..."

It felt like the way blood rushes to the surface when skin touches skin. The way hearts recognize each other in proximity and begin to beat in time. Distantly, objectively, Lavi knew that panic would be the correct response to these feelings. But he could feel nothing but comfort, safety. Affection, he realized, is an incarnation of attachment. If attachment is an idea, affection is the expression. This was bad.

"I know this is out of the blue," Lenalee said, turning big, hopeful eyes on Lavi, "But can I hug you?" Normally, Lavi would expect to see her blushing while asking a question like that, but her skin was porcelain.

_No, why?_ "Okay."

Lenalee scooted herself up to his left side and stretched her length alongside his. She draped one arm over his solar plexus and wormed the other around his back. He felt her cheek resting against his chest, her arms cinching around his ribs.

Lavi could not clearly recall the last time he had hugged someone for the sake of hugging someone. Certainly in the last couple days, he and Lenalee had found themselves clinging to the other but for purely utilitarian purposes—he told himself. In the past, he'd carried the wounded, caught the falling, shielded the vulnerable. And in those cases, Lavi didn't sense the buzzing he was feeling now, the distracting weight of skin on skin where her cool cheek touched his sternum through the unbuttoned collar of his henley. Lenalee had so much of her pressed to him, it was making his already affection-addled nerves begin to stretch taut and sing like the strings of an instrument.

Again, abstractly, something told him to take her shoulders and gently push her away. This voice, like a gramophone left on in another room in his mind, instructed him not to put his arms around her. He did anyway. And the calm chaos of things thrumming in his blood seemed to sigh and swell. Affection begets affection, and if lying alone after taking the tincture had felt warm and safe, Lenalee's body against his felt like Christmas.

Her head lifted from his chest, and Lavi looked down at her. He could see the layered browns in her eyes, fruitwood and honey and earth. Her lashes were a black fringe, and Lavi could have counted them, could have stroked them with a fingertip so they all lay flat and straight.

"Lavi?" she asked as though she did not already have his rapt attention. "Can I kiss you?"

Had Lavi been in the same room as that gramophone, he would have noticed how she didn't stammer or look away demurely or pink at all. Instead, she watched him, her two eyes focusing calmly, insistently on his one. She waited.

_No,_ said someone else. Someone in the next town over. Perhaps on another island.

"Okay."

Lenalee inched up, the entirety of her against him, tilted her head back, and pressed her lips to Lavi's.

He hadn't touched a woman in months. It had been even longer since he had kissed one. All those hours, those thoughts and nights seemed to press against a sort of integument in him. He was aware of the strain—_Lenalee's skin smelled like hickory and damp soil—_and only after it snapped did it occur to him that that had been his restraint.

Lavi seized Lenalee by the shoulders and flipped her onto her back. She let out a squeak of surprise, and he swallowed it. He sat back and yanked the zipper down on his heavy exorcist's coat. With her mouth unoccupied, Lenalee laughed into her fingers as she watched him.

"What?" Lavi asked, struggling to negotiate his arms out of the sleeves.

Lenalee answered by putting her hands on either side of his face and pulling him back down to her. Wriggling out of his coat was much more difficult with his mouth captured, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

He felt her thighs creep up his sides and tighten. Her ankles crossed against his lower back, her heels resting against his tailbone.

_Months..._

When Lavi sat back a second time, it was to fumble with his belt buckle. Lenalee stared at his hands for only a moment before squirming away to slip her underwear out from under her skirt. She seized him once more, dragged him down to press her lips frantically to his, and Lavi balanced on one hand over her, his other still clumsily working at the recalcitrant buttons on his pants.

With a quiet _slish, _he sank into her. Lenalee whimpered against his shoulder. He felt a sigh, the slackening in his blood, relief after after such pulsing, pressing anticipation. Whatever was in that tincture, the affection coursing through his veins seemed to glow, to sing. Lavi dropped his forehead against the pillow under Lenalee's head and allowed himself a moment just to savor. The warmth and the security. The incredible puzzle-piece precision of how he fit into her. The simple profundity of that link, of sharing that space with her.

Lenalee began to squirm, to rock her hips against his, and the moment passed.

She made poorly restrained noises, clawed at his back, pulled his hair. She yanked his bandana off and threw it to the floor. Lenalee seemed to move expertly, to set the pace at gasping and frenzied. Had Lavi been able to think of anything other than that moment, he would have been a bit surprised. He would not have expected such from a girl like Lenalee.

When she came, she sank her teeth into his shoulder, tasted his shirt. The next time, she whined his name into his ear, breathed hot and fast against it. The next time, she pulled his hair and made him look her in the eye for an almost hallucinatory moment before her head rocked back, her back arched up, and she cried out.

He gave her a moment to recover, and when they resumed, Lavi felt Lenalee fist her hands in his shirt, squeeze his ribs with her knees, and she began to chant his name. She inundated his senses with that sound. He could feel a chord so close to being struck, like the pitch was just barely off, like somehow, the name she mewled wasn't quite right.

Lavi found himself propped up on his elbows to meet her eyes. He was brushing her hair out of her face. He was watching her eyes watching his. He was breathing against her mouth, "Toshe." And then, "That's my name. Toshe."

Lenalee stared into his eye as though she were trying to discern words on a distant billboard. She watching him so long, lay so still. Then she put her hand on the back of his head and pulled him close. Lenalee touched her nose to his and, their lips just brushing, she breathed, "_Toshe._"

He shuddered. He'd never heard anyone say it like that.

"_Toshe._"

He began rocking against her once more, his face buried in her hair.

"_Toshe_."

He dug his fingers into her shoulder blades, clung to her. The noises in his own throat sounded foreign to him.

"_Oh, Toshe_."

Lavi felt the crescendo break, the coiling strings in him snap. He came in long, wrenching pulses, almost painful, wiping words from his thoughts, drowning his senses except for, "_Toshe, Toshe, Toshe_..."

He collapsed against her. Lenalee wrapped her arms and legs around him, stroked his hair, blew cool breaths across his neck. The air was thick and heavy, and Lavi moved with an underwater sort of sluggishness when he managed to meet Lenalee's eyes. She smiled at him, tender and unabashed, and pushed his hair out of his eye. And when the buzzings in their blood began to quiet, they rolled apart and fell asleep, dressed and above the covers.


	8. Detachment and Anonymity

**A/N:** Ascension Day, as it is portrayed here, is a hodgepodge of accounts seeing as how I have never celebrated a Saint Day. So let's just call it fiction and leave it at that, shall we?

* * *

**VIII. Detachment & Anonymity**

Lavi woke feeling rather itchy. For many reasons and in many regions. First, he had fallen asleep in the clothes he'd worn all day, and the dried sweat in them was making his sides prickle. Second, he typically took off his eyepatch when he slept, and the pressure of it against his face made the skin around the edges ache to be rubbed. And the third did not strike Lavi as particularly odd until he realized that he could attribute it only to the drying of mingled juices on his skin.

Lavi's eye shot open. He propped himself up on his elbow, saw his creased clothes, the rumpled bedspread, Lenalee asleep on her side to his left. The hem of her skirt was hitched particularly high over her hip, and Lavi knew that unless she had taken to going commando regularly, there was something terribly wrong with this setting.

"Uh-oh," was all he could manage before his stirring roused Lenalee.

She seemed to go through the same series of motions as Lavi had, and she came to the same conclusion as well. For a long, disbelieving moment, she locked eyes with Lavi, gapped at him, searched his face for an explanation because there had to be one and it had to be _not_ the one she was thinking of. She turned red from her hairline to her collar, leapt up from the bed, and ran to the bathroom.

"Lenalee, wait!" Lavi called, jumping to his feet. He paused to adjust and button his pants before taking off after her, but the bathroom door had been slammed shut when he reached it. "Lenalee," he said to the door. He pressed his ear to it. He heard the shower curtain rings clink together, but the water did not run.

"Lenalee, can I come in?" Lavi asked.

"No!" she cried, her voice muffled by the door.

He opened his mouth to insist again but hesitated. Really, what was there to say if she had let him in? He could apologize, but he didn't imagine there was a girl alive who liked to hear that first thing in the morning. That did not change the fact that he felt like apologizing, like somehow this was more his fault than it was hers. Which was dumb. She had been a willing participant; he was damn sure of that. A terrifying thought then occurred to him.

"Lenalee," he hazarded.

"What?" she snapped from within.

"That wasn't... I mean... I, uh," he swallowed, "I didn't pop your cherry, did I?"

"No!" she barked immediately.

Lavi sighed in relief. But, wait, if he hadn't... "Then who the hell did?" he demanded. It was a knee-jerk reaction, and only after he was good and pissed about it did he realize that, honestly, he had no right to be.

"That's none of your business!" she yelled, and Lavi withdrew a little with a wince.

He knew he deserved that. It was time to back track and start over. Lavi squeezed his eye shut and thought. Images of the night before swam through his mind. They were a little blurry around the edges, but the colors were so vivid. It was like he was watching a movie, someone else's amateurish sex with a pretty girl. Where had he been the whole time? He certainly hadn't felt drunk; it was like the volume on his inhibitions had simply been turned down.

He realized then why this was his fault. _He_ was the Bookman. _He_ was the one with years of practiced self-control and self-denial. And Lenalee was a girl who was allowed to do whatever she wanted with whomever she wanted. Her regret, he assumed, was rooted in her embarrassment. His, however, was a translation of a responsibility he sincerely believed Lenalee would never be able to understand let alone fulfill.

Lavi sighed. His shoulders slumped. He knocked again. "Lenalee," he said once more, "Look." He hesitated. This was not a conversation he wanted to have through a door—granted, it was not a conversation he really wanted to have at all, but he would feel much less like an asshole if there weren't a partition between them. "Can I come in?"

There was a long pause on the opposite side of the door. "It's unlocked."

Lavi settled his hand on the doorknob and turned. In the claw-footed tub against the wall opposite the door, Lenalee sat, her legs stretched down the length of the tub. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her shoulders rolled forward a little. She turned to him, her face pink as a Mediterranean sunset, and for just a moment, her big, dark eyes looked at him. Lavi hesitated in the door.

The air was too thick, too still in the bathroom, and Lavi felt a sort of repellent gravity pushing him to stay out. "Good morning," Lavi said with a sigh.

Lenalee switched her eyes to her feet.

Lavi forced his way in, like he was working through a very large, thick jello mold. Lenalee continued to watch her socked feet as Lavi sat down on the floor facing her, his right arm resting on the edge of the tub. He watched her willfully not watching him.

"So, I guess Karmenu's stuff is the real deal," Lavi offered.

Lenalee let out a short, dry laugh.

"This changes things, you know," he said. Lenalee turned a rather frightened expression on him, and it took Lavi a moment to realize that she thought that _this_ meant their sleeping together. "If these tinctures are legit," he went on quickly, "then we've got a very different case on our hands than we thought."

"I guess so," was all Lenalee had to say.

This was, Lavi then decided, the point to crank up the objectivity because, clearly, Lenalee was not going to help him out. "Okay, look," he said, angling himself to catch her eye. She looked up at him. "Lenalee... that shouldn't'a happened. For a lot of different reasons. I feel like an asshole." He shrugged his shoulders up while he waited for the next part to come to him. "And, I guess, I'm sorry?"

"Wow," Lenalee muttered. "That's exactly what a girl likes to be told."

Lavi laughed uncomfortably at his own intuition. He scratched the back of his head. "I know."

Lenalee looked back at her feet. "If you think _you_ feel bad, you have no idea how I feel."

"Why?"

She peered up at him out of the side of her eye. "Who threw herself at whom?"

Lavi laughed again, a little less tension in his throat. "Yeah, you did start it."`

Lenalee frowned "_You_ started it when you stole that bottle from Karmenu." She cast her eyes away again. "But I did... _exacerbate_ things, I suppose."

Feeling much more at ease now, Lavi leaned more heavily on the tub. "I think the take-home lesson here," he said, "is next time I get a bright idea like _hey, let's take shots of this mystery substance and see what happens_, you're supposed to be the rational, prudent member of the duo who stops me."

Lenalee gaped at him, but Lavi could see the smile pulling at her lips. "How was I was suppose to know that was going to happen? I was expecting pet cats and hand holding, remember?"

"Also," Lavi went on as though he had not heard her, "As the duly appointed rational, prudent member of the team, you should really avoid throwing yourself at me." Lenalee swatted at him, but Lavi managed to roll out of reach. "I'm just saying." She looked like she was ready to lob a complimentary bar of soap at him, and Lavi ducked behind his forearms, grinning. When he didn't feel an impact, Lavi lowered his arms and hazarded a look at his partner. Her hand raised, poised to the throw, Lenalee was giving him a rather more serious look than the tone of their conversation warranted, and Lavi knew that Lenalee's generosity with him was about to end.

"Lavi," she began hesitantly as she lowered her arm. She looked like she was considering him very thoroughly. "Is that really not your name?"

So, he had remembered that part correctly, Lavi thought. He was rather hoping that she had not. "Nope," he answered, a sort of resignation in him voice. "It is one of many, many aliases."

"How many?" She was probing now, and feeling somehow beholden to her, he answered.

"As many as I need to maintain distance." _Distance_. What an odd conversation to be having with a girl he had woken up next to. Lenalee looked like she didn't entirely understand. "It's a Bookman thing. Objectivity requires detachment. And detachment requires a certain degree of anonymity."

She furrowed her brow at him, and Lavi could tell it was out of sympathy. "And isolation," she added.

There was something below her words, a sort of question, and Lavi knew a younger him would have told her that what they had done the night before had nothing to do with attachment. Before the conversation could take a turn down a path he was even less comfortable with, Lavi began to rise to his feet. "No one ever said being a Bookman was easy." He headed for the bedroom, intent on gathering up his things and going to get cleaned up in his own hotel room. Lenalee's voice made him pause in the bathroom doorway.

"Where's that from? Toshe, I mean."

Lavi thought, weighed his options, his losses. He looked over his shoulder at her but hesitated once more. What greater damage could answering her question do, he wondered. "It's Macedonian," was all he said. He then went back to the bedroom, stooped to pick up his coat and headband and scarf, and headed toward his room across the hall.

Being a Bookman meant having a honed attention to details. Lavi spent his days practicing noticing specifics. That morning, he noticed what time he got down to the dining hall. He noticed that there was a total of thirty-six people crammed into the space—nineteen women, twelve men, and five children. He noticed the cries of a flock of gulls outside the hotel; they were flying south. He noticed the glimpse of sky through the window by the stairs—_high and topaz blue with three wisps of clouds like brush strokes_—and the sun hanging low—_bold and glaring off the storefronts_—and Lenalee keeping at least six inches of air between them at all times.

They ate their breakfasts in silence, and Lavi knew something was absent. He swirled patterns in his porridge and tried to put his finger on what was missing. He felt Lenalee's toe tap his calf when she crossed her legs, and then he got it. The physical proximity he and Lenalee had always seemed to share—he noticed how her knee did not brush his, her elbow did not bump his side—was absent. Lavi looked over at her. She usually sat almost hip to hip with him. Now, though, he could fit at least three Bibles between them.

"We're meeting Bill and Giorgio outside of St. Matthias," she said as the bell over the hotel door jingled with their exit.

"Should we tell 'em about the elixir?" Lavi asked. He watched the way Lenalee measured her steps, kept her distance from him, and he knew that if he were a nicer guy, he wouldn't have brought it up. He felt compelled to attempt professionalism—an odd compulsion for him, certainly—perhaps in response to the gravity of his lapse the night before.

She stopped in her tracks and looked at him. "Tell them what?" she asked, her cheeks red.

Lavi frowned in concern. "Lenalee," he began. A troupe of mothers and children were coming down the road, and he snagged Lenalee by the elbow and pulled her under an awning outside a cobbler's shop. He felt incredibly aware of how close he was to her like that, sequestered off to the side. "You know, you could call the Order and get reassigned. If you want to do that, you could."

Her eyes narrowed in determination. "Absolutely not," Lenalee said, her hands fisting at her sides and her face pink. "We can finish up this case, no problem."

Lavi quirked a brow at her incredulously. "You sure you can handle it?"

She was glaring at him now, and Lavi had to restrain a laugh. "Yes, I'm sure I can _handle_ it. Can _you_ handle it?"

Lavi knew a challenge when he saw one. He scoffed. "Yeah," he taunted. "Bring it."

Lenalee turned her chin up just a notch and started off down the road toward the church. Lavi jogged a few paces to catch up to her, and when he drew up to her left, he watched her out of the side of his eye. She had that obstinate frown on her face. Lavi thrust his hands in his pockets and batted her with his elbow. Lenalee stumbled, but when she glared over at him, Lavi was looking at the sky and whistling. She snorted angrily and shoved him hard.

That was a little more forceful than Lavi had anticipated, and he almost spilled himself in the road. "Jeez, Lenalee," he laughed as he righted himself, "Aggressive much?"

She crossed her arms over her chest, and Lavi felt her shoulder bump his arm as they walked. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "I think we should tell Bill and Giorgio that we did a little investigating, and we found that the tinctures really do have some effect."

"Uh, _some_ effect?" Lavi asked.

Despite her frown, Lenalee's cheeks pinked again. "I'm not prepared to make a conclusive statement on these feelings elixirs until I've gotten more straight answers. It's possible we experienced some kind of placebo effect."

Lavi had experienced placebo effect before, and it had never gotten him laid before. He thought it best not to argue this one too hard with her, though, and instead screwed up his mouth in thought. "Feelixirs," he offered.

"What?" Lenalee asked.

The lane they were walking down opened as it met two others in the wide, cobbled courtyard before the church. "Feelixirs," Lavi repeated. "That's what I'm going to call them."

The courtyard ahead of them was a very different courtyard than it had been the day before. It had been downright _festooned_. Garlands of blood-red hibiscus blooms, strung so that they nested together in thick, ruffled ropes, hung over the door of the church, connected the decorative stonework on the facade to the lamp post, swayed like swollen clothes lines between storefronts. Brightly-colored paper chains stretched overhead as well, making rustling sounds as the links rubbed together in the breeze. An almost life-sized paper mache woman—her eyes downcast, her arms spread, a serene smile on her pink mouth—sat in a larger wood and paper niche at the head of the courtyard before the steps leading to the church entrance. She was painted in Mediterranean teal and fuchsia, her skin eggshell, her long, rippled hair driftwood brown. Streamers attached to the niche fluttered in the sea breeze. Around the woman—presumably the Virgin—long, wooden picnic tables had been set up. There were perhaps thirty or so tables, crammed so tightly into the courtyard that Lavi and Lenalee had to turn sideways and shuffle through.

There was a perimeter of about ten feet of open space around the image of the Virgin. Fallen petals scuttled across the ground in the wind, swirled around their feet as they approached. Under the niche were two long, parallel poles, both ends extending far beyond the base of the statue. Once they were close enough, they could see the flakes of mica and small seashells that had been stuck in the paper mache when it was still wet. Sheets of crisp taffeta and white linen were draped around Her shoulders, leaving only the long curve of Her pale throat exposed. What looked like powdered iron had been dusted just lightly over Her cheeks, and She looked healthy, demure and welcoming with Her arms open. Palm fronds fanned out across the back of niche, their grey-green making Her blues and reds even bolder.

"Dang," Lavi said when they came to stop directly before the statue.

Lenalee lifted her hand and gently set it in the Virgin's. They were almost the same color. "She's beautiful."

It was so quiet there, so still, and Lavi didn't realize that he had rested a hand on Lenalee's lower back until she looked up at him.

"Can I tell you a secret?" she asked.

Lavi felt his heart jump up into his throat. He swallowed it down, scrubbed from his mind the memory of the look on her face when she had made him meet her eyes the night before. It seemed that as time passed, the images became clearer. He thought maybe now, alone with her in the sun and the stillness before this colorful storm broke, he could remember what made him kiss her back. He could maybe, just a little bit, empathize with himself.

The doors to the church burst open with a wave of children, and Lavi and Lenalee jumped apart. The quiet of the courtyard shattered into the shrieks of the children as they flooded outward. The kids were all perhaps ten or so, all dressed in their Sunday best except one girl who, in addition to her little powder-pink dress and white mary-janes, had cardboard wings strapped to her arms, which she flapped enthusiastically. The rush of children charged down the stairs in a pack and parted around the image of the Virgin. Lavi stepped a little closer to Lenalee so that he was safely in the eddy the statue created. Together, they watched the children disperse into the sea of tables, letting out peals of Maltese as they climbed and chased and clustered.

"Hold me," Lavi whispered to Lenalee in a high, frightened voice.

Lenalee laughed and gave him a gentle shove. "They don't bite."

After the wave of children from the church came the adults, all chatting and laughing. They flooded down the stairs as well, none of them paying much attention to the two, young Exorcists quietly observing. From the direction of the inn, the breakfast crowd came down the street, making a similar ruckus, the children charging ahead.

Soon the courtyard was packed with people sitting at the tables, loitering around the image of the Virgin, chatting on the steps. The noise was spectacular, the voices all crashing together into one roar of sounds neither Lavi nor Lenalee could interpret. Lavi had to put his mouth practically to Lenalee's ear when he told her that they should step off to the side. She nodded and headed in the direction he had pointed.

He felt like an interloper here. He didn't know these people or their language, and the closest he'd come to celebrating a Saint Day in the last decade had been exchanging Christmas gifts with the other Exorcists. And they all looked so happy, these joyful believers, all coming together to celebrate their faith. Lavi couldn't remember the last time he'd felt that way. Lenalee's hand curled around his elbow. He looked down at her. She was watching the revelers with a bright, unabashed smile on her face, her eyes dancing from person to person.

Platters of food began pouring out of the church like it was a race. Women in grey and dun-colored dresses hurried about, laying out bowls of punch and big, wooden plates of sliced fruit. A small band gathered on the steps of the church, a guitar and a trombone and a washboard.

"Good morning!" a voice cried from their left. Lavi looked over and saw Bill and Giorgio strolling toward them, Bill giving a small wave.

"Where you been?" Lavi called, a hand cupped around his mouth. They couldn't quite make out Giorgio's reply, but judging from the shape his mouth made, Lavi figured he was either saying _the past_ or _mass._

The two finders came up to them, looking much more laid back than they had since Lavi had met them. They looked, in fact, as though the cheer of the believers in the courtyard had infected them. Lavi could not recall seeing Bill smile like that.

"Are we still planning to interrogate the priest?" Lavi asked as he, Lenalee, and the finders huddled together to hear one another.

"I doubt you could get near him today," Giorgio said. "Perhaps you should enjoy the festivities and try again tomorrow?"

Lavi rolled his eye and sighed. "If he's off being priestly with all these folks here, I don't imagine we have much of a choice." He pushed his hands into his pockets. "We learned something interesting last night," he said.

Lenalee's hand landed on his elbow, but they stood so close that he didn't think Bill or Giorgio noticed. He felt her fingers dig into his arm. He glanced down at her. She did a poor job hiding the beseeching look on her face.

"What is it?" Bill asked, switching his eyes between the two Exorcists.

"Just that there might be some truth to these feelixirs," Lavi evaded, grinning as disarmingly as he could.

"To what?" Giorgio asked.

"Feelixirs," Lavi repeated. "That's what I've decided to call them."

Someone in the crowd cried something that got Giorgio's attention. A young girl, perhaps eight or nine, was calling to him with her hands around her mouth. He called something back and waved at her. He then turned to his colleagues and said, "You must excuse me," he said. "I understand that this is, perhaps, unprofessional..."

Lavi laughed. _Unprofessional_ seemed to be the theme of this investigation. "You wanna go party with the other Virgin-worshipers?" He felt Lenalee's fingers dig even harder into his arm.

Giorgio gave a rather unfriendly laugh. "Keep in mind, Exorcist, you are one as well. If only by association." He turned to Lenalee. "I am one of the carriers," he said, "I must go assist." With that, he nodded to his colleagues and returned to the crowd in the courtyard.

"Carrier of _what?_" Lavi asked, still bristling a little.

"Of the Image," Bill said. "They pick up the statue of the Virgin and carry it through the streets before bringing it back to the church."

Lavi screwed up his mouth in confusion. "Why not just take up into the church now?"

Lenalee laughed a warbling, musical laugh, like tumbling water. It was so effulgent and light that Lavi was a little startled. She held her fingers before her open mouth, her face tilted sunward, and laughed and laughed. It was directed at him, and abstractly, he knew he should take offense. But her throat was a long, pale curve, and he remembered how it had felt against his face.

Lavi swallowed hard.

"The Feast of the Ascension into Heaven celebrates the Blessed Virgin's divine birthday," Bill explained. "It is the day the angels came for Her and brought the Virgin's sinless soul and uncorrupt body to Heaven." Lavi blew out a sigh that ruffled his bangs—he could think of a lot of things that could corrupt a body a lot worse than getting knocked up the old fashioned way. Bill furrowed his brow, dismayed. "Did they not make you attend a class or a seminar of some kind when you joined the Order, Lavi?"

Lenalee laughed even harder. Lavi dug his finger into his ear distractedly. "Yeah, they tried. Turns out I'm a visual-learner, and my Bible didn't have any pictures in it."

"Well," Lenalee managed through her waning laughter, "This won't be a total loss. With everyone in one place like this, we'll have a much easier time questioning people."

"Not without Giorgio, you won't," Bill reminded them. "You might find a couple people who can understand you, but I wouldn't be too hopeful."

"Oh, right," Lenalee said. Her lips tightened as she thought for a moment, and then she shrugged. "Well, it's worth a shot." With that, she started toward the courtyard, her arms swaying loosely at her sides. Lavi and Bill exchanged a look and a shrug and took off after Lenalee. They rather had to queue up as they worked through the crowd, Lenalee at the head, Lavi behind her, and Bill trailing behind. Bodies tried to wedge past them, and soon, Bill got separated from the tail of their line. Lavi hung close to Lenalee, set his hands on her shoulders, and stayed at her back.

"_Skuzi,_" Lenalee said warmly to anyone who would make eye contact with her, "_Titkellem bl-Ingliz?_" she would ask as cheerfully as she could while shouting over the crowd.

Most people replied, "_Ie_," and waved her aside. Some looked apologetic and said, "_Skuzani,_"before hurrying away.

After the fifth person shot them down, Lenalee looked over her shoulder at Lavi, who was practically pressed to her back where they stood between two picnic tables in a sea of bodies. She was not expecting him to be so close, and for one oddly still moment, she was almost nose to nose with him.

Lavi drew back a little, his hands still on her shoulders. "No luck, huh?" he said, close enough that he didn't have to shout.

She craned her neck and leaned her mouth toward his ear, which he offered her accordingly. "I think Bill was right," she said.

Lavi grinned and gave her shoulders a squeeze. "You just gotta flash 'em a little leg, Lenalee."

She jabbed her elbow back into Lavi's solar plexus, and he let out an _oof_. "Why don't you?" she retorted.

"If you think it would work," Lavi said, holding his sore middle. "I gotta warn you, though, I don't think we're gonna get much response at a Catholic party."

Lenalee rolled her eyes, took Lavi by the wrist, and led him farther in. She could see the church looming ahead of them, the image of the Virgin still waiting at the foot of the steps. As she and Lavi worked their ways through, Lenalee began to see that the crowd around the image was a lot less rowdy than the revelers at the picnic tables. More people stood still with their heads bowed. Quite a few people had their palms pressed together before their chests, their lips touching the last knuckles of their index fingers.

Something in the face of the Virgin made Lenalee pause. She looked so calm and so happy, offering and welcoming and succoring with her arms wide like that. Lenalee felt Lavi edge up to her back, so close that she could discern the angles of his Black Order insignia pressing into her shoulder blade. She shuddered involuntarily.

"You cold?" he asked.

Lenalee's cheeks warmed a little. "No, no," she assured him. She couldn't think of what else to tell him—certainly not the truth, certainly not that some part of her thought that all these little casual touches of his were just a few degrees of fervor away from the remembered touches that seemed to be playing on repeat through her mind—and instead, she looked down at the base of the image. People had tossed coins and folded slips of paper at the Virgin's feet. Lenalee couldn't help but wonder what would happen to all those prayers once the Virgin was brought into the church. Did the priests read them? Did they scoop them up and throw them away? Where do prayers go anyway?

"We should keep asking," Lenalee said over her shoulder. If Lavi agreed at all, Lenalee did not look back to see. She headed, instead, toward the band, striking a between-song tableau on the steps to the right of the statue. There were five men with their instruments across their knees or resting from their straps, and Lenalee beamed her brightest beam when she said, "_Skuzi, titkellem bl-Ingliz?_"

Four men gave her various versions of no—some more friendly than others—but a man with a trombone in his lap looked up and grinned. "You buy beer. I speak English!"

x

x

x

"Last year," the trombonist, an older man named Tonio, explained, "We close Main Street!" He gestured with his free hand toward the window of the pub, which looked over the vacant Main Street. "Not walk because marching band. I play with fifteen men." He pointed the neck of his bottle at Lenalee for emphasis.

Tonio was fifty or so with brown, leathery skin from the Mediterranean sun. His mop of hair was black and thick, shocks of grey at his temples. His black eyes smiled when he spoke of the past, and Lenalee felt herself trusting his man, trusting his sweet, sad nostalgia. She looked over at Lavi, who was clearly not trusting Tonio just yet.

"You marched in the street?" Lenalee asked.

Tonio took a draw from his beer and nodded. "Yes. After mass. Again behind _Santa Marija_. Again with fireworks." He shook his head and looked down at the table.

Lenalee stole another glance at Lavi. He had his arms folded across his chest and was leaned back in his chair. That didn't seem like him. Lavi certainly had thicker walls than most men, but he was rarely unabashedly rude. Something about Tonio was putting Lavi on his guard, and Lenalee was not certain what.

She looked back at Tonio. "Why don't you march anymore?" she asked.

Tonio sighed.

"Does it have anything to do with _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr _and Karmenu?" she prompted.

Tonio sighed again and thinned his lips. He looked down the neck of his beer for a moment and then met Lenalee's eyes. "Most men," he began, a sort of resignation in his voice, "are very sad. And," he paused, cast his eyes over Lenalee's head as he thought, "they do not know..." he began to make a small wheeling gesture before his sternum, "ways to happiness."

"Have you ever tried Karmenu's... um..." Lenalee did not think Tonio would know the word elixir.

"_Medicina?_" Tonio offered. Lenalee nodded. "Yes, one time."

Lenalee sat forward. "And it worked?"

Tonio nodded. "Yes," he answered somewhat noncommittally. There was a catch to Tonio's _yes_. Lenalee could sense it.

"But?"

Tonio looked away once more. When he met Lenalee's eyes again, he was smiling, shaking his head a little. "I try joy. And I feel joy from _medicina_. But," he worked with the words, sought the right one, "But it bring _memory_ of joy. Not now joy. Not new joy." His smile deepened. "Not joy I feel from music." He put his hand over the crucifix dangling from a chain around his neck. "Not joy from _Alla_."

Lenalee understood. She thought back to the night before. While the elixir had caused her to behave affectionately, it had started with the memory of arms around her. She wondered then what she would have experienced if Lavi hadn't been then. When she glanced at her partner, she got the distinct impression that he was wondering the same.

"You do not know," Tonio interrupted Lenalee's train of thought. She looked over to see him leaning forward and glancing to the right and left. "You do not know _from me_, but," he glanced around once more. "Karmenu. In spring. _Father_ Karmenu."

Lavi bolted forward. "What?"

"Sshsshssh!" Tonio hissed, waving his hands at Lavi. He glanced around once more. "Before," he hissed. "Before _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr. _Before _medicina_. Karmenu is _qassis._ _Father_ Karmenu."

Lenalee turned to Lavi, saw his matching expression of confusion and incredulity. She opened her mouth to ask what that could mean, but she did not have the opportunity to finish.

Someone outside screamed. It was distant, perhaps down the street, but it was loud enough and close enough to make the few pub goers look up.

"What the hell was that?" Lavi asked.

A moment of silence lapsed from outside the pub. Then began the shrill chorus of many screams, a wall of sound. Lenalee jumped to her feet and rushed for the door, Lavi at her heels. She threw the door open, skidded to a halt in the center of the street.

Outside, the noise was clearer, more terrible. People were shrieking, bodies colliding as revelers fled the church courtyard as fast as they could. Picnic table legs screeched across the stones as they were shoved and flipped. At the end of the street, where the storefronts opened to the wide court, people were clawing over each other, scrabbling to get away from the church and the huge, gray masses hovering in the air over the steeples.

"Oh, shit," Lavi breathed. "It's _Akuma!_"


	9. Preoccupation and Distraction

**A/N:** My efforts to keep the chapters of this story concise little soundbytes have failed in this eleven-page chapter. My apologies for the delays. I had the flu and was down for the count for a week, and then I recently gave myself food poisoning. Yuck. Anyway, this chapter includes harsher language than in previous installments; it also includes just _oodles_ of UST. Also, Autonoë comes to us from Euripides's _The Bacchae_. A wonderful little dollop of the human condition, that. One that I find particularly relevant to my rendering of Lavi.

* * *

**IX. Preoccupation & Distraction**

Lavi's longer legs took him farther faster, and Lenalee let him pull ahead a few strides as they charged toward the small pack of Akuma firing randomly into the crowd before she roused her Innocence, felt the crackling buzz, felt the warm flutter of wings around her ankles, the sensation of something less corporeal than blood rushing through her legs. She kicked off from the ground and was soon high in the air and well ahead of Lavi.

The grey, expressionless bodies bobbed in the air over the church, one over the entrance to the church and one over each of the two bell towers.

Conditions could not have been worse. The street was packed. People could not flee fast enough. The Akuma did not even have to aim.

The air became more tangible when her Innocence flared to life, gravity more of a guideline than a rule. Lenalee would describe it almost as swimming with perhaps less resistance. She swiveled her body in midair, pushed off of nothing, and managed to avoid a spray of fire from the Akuma over the church's front entrance. In the fraction of a moment when she was eye level with the three Akuma, Lenalee determined to take out the foremost shooter, who had the widest access to the densest crowd. The Akuma to the left and right were attacking on a more limited scope, picking off people as they fled down the two side streets flanking the church, and Lenalee glanced down long enough to see Lavi charging down the road to the right.

The center Akuma fired a shower of shots at Lenalee, and she duck and wove through them, felt the heat of them as they just breathed past her. Before the Akuma could adjust his shots for a closer target, Lenalee was upon him. With a high axe kick and a guttural cry, she brought her heel down hard on the frozen mask of a face, shattering it like a porcelain bowl. In the momentary pause she allowed herself, Lenalee turned and looked at the scene below her.

Corpses were draped over the picnic tables. People flooded down the street in the distance, huddled behind benches, darted into stores. The top of the Virgin statue had been shot off, leaving a cross-section of the grotto and her small, hollow body. A single, discarded cardboard wing lay on the ground in courtyard.

Lenalee heard a _swoosh_ and _crunch_ from behind her, and she launched off from the tiled roof of the church, spun in the air, and hovered long enough to see Lavi airborne below her, thrown across the street from the force of his hammer's impact against another Akuma. She watched him deftly curl his body, land crouched on both feet and one hand, the other retracting his hammer. He slid across the dusty street, kicked hard off the curb, and charged back toward the front of the church.

She turned then and saw that the third and final Akuma had slipped over the steeple and was descending on the street below. A renewed chorus of shrieks sounded as the Akuma dipped out of sight.

Twisting in the air, Lenalee compelled herself toward the last Akuma. She did not make it very far, however.

Just as she approached the steeple, something collided with her midair. The tail of a fourth Akuma, a serpent-like Level Two who was a great deal more than the mere inconvenience of his comrades, had come down upon her. She took the blow across her ribs and flank, and she was flung to the courtyard below, like an ant flicked from a sleeve.

Lavi saw Lenalee's body, small and bent, streak through the air and crash hard against a picnic table. The horror of the scene seemed to slow down for him, his Bookman senses absorbing every terrible detail. He noted the sound her back made when it hit. He noted the way her spine folded back to conform to the table's edge. He noted the snap of her head, the flail of her arms, and finally, the shape of her when she slumped to the stones. She looked like a doll, an unstrung marionette.

He felt a wrenching, tearing sensation in his throat, and he realized only abstractly that he was shouting her name.

Lavi had been on a path for the side of the church, but he swerved so hard that he tumbled to the ground. He rolled through the fall, though, and scrambled across the cobblestones to where Lenalee lay on her back, her body making a s-curve at the foot of the picnic table she had hit.

He didn't dare move her in she had broken something—that sent a bolt of terror through his already fear-addled senses: _She could be broken. _Lavi touched his fingers to her throat. He felt her pulse fluttering under her skin, and that had to be enough for the moment.

The Akuma that had struck her, now writhing and whipping in the air above the church, was peering down at them, an obscenity of a smile stretched across its rictus. The last Level One came into view around the corner of the church, and Lavi leapt to his feet.

"_You son of bitch!_" he roared. He charged forward, drew his hammer, and in one smooth motion, swung it in an arc, past his right thigh, across his shoulder, and over his head. He felt it extending in his hands almost before he could cry out the command, and the head fell so hard and so fast that the next thing Lavi could see after the gunmetal-gray streak of motion, was his hammer lodged in the ground, the spindly tail of the Akuma poking out, twitching, twitching, and stilling.

A howl of rage sounded overhead, and Lavi looked up to see the serpent-Akuma thrashing.

"You're next, Buttercup!" Lavi barked, resting his now diminished hammer against his shoulder and pointing threateningly up at the enemy.

The Akuma jerked its head around to stare down at him. Lavi wedged the spike at the head of his hammer into the stones, pointed the handle toward the Akuma overhead, and bid it extend. He shot up through the air, both soles and one hand on the handle. He overshot the roof of the church by about ten feet, and as he fell through the air, he heaved his hammer up and around to his right. The Akuma shot into the air and coiled up clear of the hammer as it swung harmlessly a few feet below the Akuma's armored underside.

"I'm gonna eat mac'n'cheese outta the bottom of your skull, you undead bastard," Lavi snarled once he had landed on the roof, crouched and wound tight, both hands on his hammer. The Akuma circled overhead.

A grating noise, like fork tines across a tin plate, issued from the Akuma's mouth. It must have been a laugh because it turned its grotesque, scrap metal heap of a grin on Lavi and said, "Have I touched a nerve, Exorcist?"

Lavi grit his teeth, tightened his grip of his hammer, and prepared to give another overhand swing. This attack was undoubtedly his most satisfying—he could feel the crunch and give of his opponent—but it was also his slowest, and before Lavi could get his hammer over his head, the Akuma was rippling off into the sky, that screeching laugh tumbling out behind it.

Lavi wasted no time with his disappointment. He spun, sent the head of his hammer shooting toward the ground, and once the spike was jammed into the stones, Lavi rode the handle to the ground. Before he could land, his gaze found Lenalee among the overturned tables and bodies. She was easy to spot now that she was on one knee and pushing herself up slowly, painfully from the ground. In his haste to get to her, Lavi timed his landing poorly, hit the ground awkwardly, and the inertia of his descent on the handle spilled him onto the cobblestones.

With her left elbow up on the picnic table she had hit, Lenalee levered herself up from the ground, and she looked up in time to see Lavi slip off his hammer, hit the ground, and tumble over himself. His hammer flashed back to a manageable size without his command as he scrambled toward her.

"Lenalee!" he shouted as he descended on her. She felt one hand cup her elbow, the other close around her upper arm. He helped tip her weight onto the picnic table, where she waited for the pulsing, shooting pain in her ribs to pass.

"I'm okay," she assured him. She draped and arm over her solar plexus, holding her aching side, when she felt Lavi's grip on her shoulder tightening.

Lenalee looked up. Lavi's one eye was round and switching frantically over her face. He looked, she thought with some surprise, frightened. Truly frightened.

"You scared the shit outta me," he managed, curling his fingers into her arm.

"Seriously, Lavi," she assured him, "A few bruised ribs. It knocked the wind out of me." She put a hand over his.

A hissing sound began to issue from the bodies on the ground. Both exorcists looked down and around them to see the corpses, pale skins now dotted with ever-darkening stars, begin to flake apart and crumple.

"Oh, no," Lenalee breathed, "We've got to get away from these bodies." She started to bolt toward the church but nearly toppled over, wincing. Bent double like that, Lenalee could see the poisonous gas the infected bodies released begin to cloud around her feet.

"Can you walk?" Lavi asked, bent with her and cradling her shoulders firmly.

"I don't..." Lenalee grit her teeth, willing the sharp white light out of her vision. "I can," she gasped, "It just hurts."

The hissing was getting louder, and Lenalee felt an acrid sting against her bare legs.

"You're really not going to like my suggestion," Lavi said, switching his gaze from her strained face to the expanding cloud of noxious fumes.

Lenalee knew it already. "Just do it," she ground out.

Lavi didn't need to be told twice. Hooking one arm under her shoulders, he scooped up her knees and did his best to ignore the noises she made as he hoisted her up and curled her against him, tweaking and bending her damaged ribcage. He felt her hands fisting in his coat, her face pressing into his shoulder, but he could apologize later. The closest shelter was the church, and Lavi charged past the smoldering remains of the statue of the Virgin. He could hear Lenalee's whimpers as he jogged up the stairs, her body jostling in his arms despite his best efforts to stabilize her. Once they were safe inside, Lavi thought, she could upbraid him all she wanted.

A boy stood just inside the church, the door cracked so that he could look out, and when Lavi leapt up onto the landing, the boy pushed the door open. Lavi turned sideways and edged himself and Lenalee in, feet first. The cluster of frightened people—perhaps fifty total—in the dim atrium pressed forward toward the exorcists, speaking to them in Maltese, and if Lavi had had a free hand, he would have swept them back, toppled them like bowling pins.

Had Lenalee been in any state to scold him, Lavi knew she would have reminded him that these people had probably never seen an Akuma before and were terrified beyond rationality; he should be more patient with them. Lavi could just imagine her saying it, and that was somehow comforting. With that in mind, he didn't hesitate to body check a frightened and intrigued man who, in his efforts to get a better look, danced in Lavi's way.

Lavi managed to get Lenalee to the pews, and just as he set her down, he saw out of his peripheral vision the white spill of sunlight cutting through the atrium's thick dim. Lavi gasped and looked toward the entrance. People were opening the door, heading outside.

"No!" Lavi shouted at them, standing up in the nave and waving his arms. "Close the goddamn door, you idiots! Don't go outside!"

He got a crowd of blank faces in response, but over their heads, Lavi could see the blinding block of light pouring through the door. He looked back at Lenalee, who was pale and gasping on the pew, clutching at her side.

"Sir," a small, feminine voice said to his left. Lavi whipped his head around. The woman who had helped him on his first night there stood in the aisle, two more women in the same plain dresses flanking her. "I will stay with her," the woman said, gesturing to Lenalee.

Lavi didn't waste time thanking her. He pivoted on one foot and barreled toward the door.

"Outta my _fucking_ way," he barked, sweeping shoulders aside as best he could.

When he reached the door, a woman was about to step into the sun, a cautious look on her face. Lavi seized her by the shoulders and flung her back inside.

The bodies in the courtyard below were crackling and turning to mounds of dust before his eye, the toxic cloud creeping up the stairs. Two boys, both perhaps six-years-old, stood on the steps in their rumpled Sunday suits, surveying the damage through the rising fog. Lavi darted down the stairs, snatched at both boys by the arm, and jerked them up the stairs. When they turned their faces up to him, he saw one of them was cold and impassive, and the other was streaked with tears.

Lavi practically threw them up stairs toward the door, the crying boy beginning to wail as reality percolated down. The blank-faced boy ambled his own way through the cracked door of the church, but the tear-stained boy slumped to the concrete landing, his face crumpled, his mouth hanging open and motionless as shriek after shriek tore out of him.

The poisonous gas was curling around Lavi's ankles when he stooped and gathered up the boy, who latched onto his front with every available anchor he could. Lavi slipped in through the door and pulled it closed with his free hand behind him.

The boy continued to sob and sob.

"Tell me about it, kiddo," Lavi muttered. He hardily registered the hands of someone else in the atrium reaching out and plucking the child from his arms.

Lavi elbowed his way through the pack of people for a third time. More people stepped out of his path as he charged through, the image of Lenalee, supine and writhing on the pew, in his vision like an afterimage burning against the dusty dim of the atrium.

When he entered the nave, flooded with daylight pouring through the clerestory windows, Lavi saw Lenalee standing and propped up against a woman in a grey dress. She limped and shuffled down the aisle, one arm curled around her injured side. Lavi jogged forward and drew level with Lenalee. She looked up at him, gave him a smile with some effort.

"The Sister said she'd take me to a room," Lenalee said, grimacing. "She said they'd get someone to take a look at me."

Lavi stepped around Lenalee's back and gently tapped the woman helping her on the shoulder. The woman looked up at him.

"I've got her," he said, and the woman disentangled herself from Lenalee, carefully transferring her to Lavi. To Lenalee, he asked, "You wanna walk or do you wanna ride?"

She laughed a little and winced. "A ride would be great."

Lavi ducked his head so Lenalee could drape her arm over his shoulders. He asked if she were ready. Lenalee squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her mouth tight, and nodded. As smoothly as he could, Lavi swept her up. He didn't hitch her up against him but, instead, lifted his arms just enough to roll her toward his chest. Still, she hissed through her teeth and whined in her throat.

"Sorry," Lavi mumbled.

"Don't be," Lenalee gasped, her expression still screwed tight, her right hand clutching his lapel.

He couldn't watch her face anymore. "Where to?" Lavi asked the woman who had been helping Lenalee.

With a sweet, sad sort of smile, she said, "We have no open room." She shook her head. "Even your loft is occupied. Father Mifsud has offered the antechamber to his study. There is a couch there where she can rest."

"Lead the way, ma'am."

She took them up toward the chancel and then down a corridor to the left, the opposite direction from the travelers quarters they had occupied their first night on Malta. This passage was much shorter with high, narrow windows. The doors in the walls were spaced farther apart, were broader, had a fresher coat of paint than those in the traveler's wing. The door knobs were cut glass, big as fists and clear as diamond. The woman stopped at the first door on the right, rapped her knuckles on a smooth, burgundy panel.

A voice within replied, "_Iva_," and the woman turned the knob. She stepped through and held the door. Lavi turned sideways and carefully inched himself and his injured partner through.

The antechamber was a high-ceiling, long room, the walls lined with glass-paneled cabinets. Most of the shelves were populated by books with the occasional placard or photograph. The windows in this room were similarly high and swollen with sunlight, viney and stalked plants clustered at the foot of each in ornate ceramic pots. On the opposite end of the room, a door stood ajar, and beyond, Lavi could see a wide desk, two chairs, and many, many more books. Before the door were two brown leather couches, facing one another with a low table between them, and the woman who had shown them in hurried forward and gestured toward the couch on the left. She then turned and began exchanging low, tense Maltese with the priest, who was pacing tight little circles just outside the door to his study.

"I'm putting you down," Lavi warned as he drew up to the couch.

"Oh, come on, Doc, it's not that bad, is it?" Lenalee asked, a forced lightness in her voice.

Lavi needed a moment to realize that she was joking. "That's not funny," he said despite himself. He lowered Lenalee slowly, bending carefully over her. Standing like that, with her weight in his arms instead of against him, he was struck by how small she was, the airiness of her bones. He watched the slender muscles in her throat stand out as she held up her head, and he wondered that any body could hold together with such frail-looking parts.

The priest and the woman continued to speak with short, jerky gestures.

But this was Lenalee, he reminded himself. Small she might be, but Lavi would never describe her as frail. Still, he felt the urge to curve his palm around the back of her neck, to cinch an arm around her waist, the same way he might feel compelled to curl his hand around a key, to feel its angles and be assured tangibly of its safety. He restrained himself, of course, and set her gingerly on the couch so that she was sitting up.

"May I get you something?" the woman asked from behind Lavi.

Lenalee sat sideways on the couch, not wanting to put any pressure on her aching back, and Lavi sat facing her. He watched the top of her bowed head, the back of the wrist draped over her side.

"I'll take a double-scotch neat and an appletini for the lady," he said, not taking his eye off his partner.

Lenalee's shoulders jerked involuntarily, and she let out a strangled mix of a laugh and a groan. She managed to lift her eyes to his. "Don't make me laugh, Lavi, please," she said with a painful smile.

Empathetic as he was, Lavi felt better having made her laugh. He looked up at the woman, who was giving him a confused expression. "A glass of water would be great, thanks," he said. That, the woman understood.

"There is no doctor here," the woman informed him, "We could send someone to get him."

"No," Lavi said firmly. "Don't let anyone go outside. Not for a while."

The woman nodded. "Yes, of course. I believe that the bonesetter took refuge here. He is in the atrium."

"He'll have to do," Lavi said. The woman nodded her head and hurried out of the room. From the other door, the priest said something that sounded rather like a question. Lavi looked over the top of Lenalee's head at the priest, Father Mifsud. Lavi gave him an apologetic look and shook his head. The priest seemed to understand. He nodded and went into his study.

This struck Lavi as odd. Wouldn't the shepherd want to tend to his flock after the attacking wolf has been slain?

"Lavi," Lenalee said, tilting her head up at him. "Do you think I need a bonesetter?"

Her face was pale, her lips a little blue-tinged. "I don't," he said. "But I think he's seen enough bodies to be able give you an informed once over. When all that fog outside has cleared, we'll get you to a real doctor." Lavi let out a dry laugh. "Be glad we have a bonesetter, at least. I was afraid she was going to say Karmenu was in the atrium."

Lenalee made a disgusted noise in her throat. "That's just what I need. I'll take a bottle of Not-In-Pain, please."

"We'll put a couple drops in your appletini, and you'll be right as rain," Lavi said.

The door to the hall opened again, and the woman returned with an old, old man close behind her. He had a full head of steely hair and rounded shoulders, his glasses perched precariously on the end of his leathery nose. He shuffled in, looked from Lenalee to Lavi and then to the woman. He said something in Maltese, but the woman shook her head and answered.

"What did he say?" Lavi asked.

"He asked that you leave the room, sir," the woman said, "But I told him that this was your wife and that you must stay."

Lavi had forgotten all about that. "Oh, yeah, right," he said. "My wife." He put a hand on Lenalee's knee, feeling the familiar scratch of her wooly stockings, as though to prove it. When Lenalee glared at him, Lavi gave her the most disarming grin in his arsenal. She rolled her eyes in grudging consent.

"If you approve, sir, I will translate," the woman said, hanging close to the bonesetter's shoulder as he ambled his way toward the couch.

Lavi thought it strange that she would ask him and not Lenalee, but it then occurred to him that he was in a Catholic church and, therefore, must have some degree of pretend-ownership of his pretend-wife. Lavi imagined that, had the circumstance not been what they were, he could have had a grand time cashing in on his Simon-says sort of power. "Yeah, that's fine," he said.

The bonesetter asked Lavi a question as he approached.

"He wants to know what happened," the woman translated.

"She, uh," Lavi started. Where to begin? "She fell from pretty high and hit her back on the edge of a table," he explained, and the woman translated. He thought it probably made a difference that Lenalee had been flung against the table while flying, but that would have required a lot more backstory than he felt like giving.

The bonesetter asked another question.

"Where did she hit?"

Lenalee moved her arm to point at her mid-back, but angling her shoulder like that made her hiss with pain. She dropped her arm and looked rather pathetically up at Lavi.

"Right here," he said, pointing where Lenalee had indicated. "You should probably take off your coat," he said to her. She nodded and began working at the buttons, slowly, painfully.

Lavi debated, he _really_ debated, helping her. He could see that, as the adrenaline faded, Lenalee was hurting more and more—her brow furrowed deeper with every inhalation, her breaths becoming like gasps. He imagined even wiggling her toes would hurt those busted ribs of hers. He glanced up at the bonesetter, whose tanned, calm face was gazing down at him, and Lavi could see something like skepticism edging into those black eyes.

_Right_, Lavi told himself, _Pretend-husband._ He pushed Lenalee's hands aside and began deftly unbuttoning her coat, focusing on his fingers to avoid meeting her eyes.

He swallowed hard and slipped the coat off her, exposing her bare shoulders and her thin-strapped, cream-colored camisole. He could smell her sweat. "Here," Lavi said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and tried again, "Right here."

The bonesetter came around behind Lenalee and sank with some effort to the couch.

Lavi was determined now. He scooted closer to Lenalee and helped her slide her arms out of her sleeves. He draped her discarded coat over her lap and coaxed her to lean toward him. He swept the two dark tails of her hair over one shoulder. When he finally met Lenalee's gaze, he couldn't read her expression. He preferred it that way.

The bonesetter tutted, drawing Lavi's attention over Lenalee's shoulder and down her back.

There was a stripe of blood, blotted in her camisole, perpendicular to her spine about halfway up her back. Lavi flinched at the sight of it. Somehow the blood brought her injury out, made it tangible, and he was resting a palm on the back of her neck, pushing her cheek to his shoulder before he could stop himself. He heard Lenalee hiss when he began peeling the fabric up from her skin, bunching her camisole between her shoulder blades.

Lavi felt her palms settle against his thighs.

The bonesetter began speaking as he inspected Lenalee's pale, naked back.

"Could be worse," translated the woman, who was hovering by the bonesetter's shoulder. "The impact broke the skin," she went on as the bonesetter continued. "She will hurt badly and bruise badly."

"I could have told you that," Lenalee muttered into Lavi's shoulder.

"Is anything broken?" Lavi asked. The woman translated to the bonesetter, who sat back, rested his hands in his lap, and answered tersely.

"He doesn't know," the woman translated. "Perhaps a rib." When the bonesetter interjected with a question, the woman answered. She then looked back to Lavi and said, "He asked if she can walk. I told him that, yes, she can, but with pain."

Groaning deep in his throat, the bonesetter rose to his feet. He stood over Lavi, said something with finality, and pushed his glasses up his nose. "He says she needs rest, ice to stop the swelling, and brandy for the pain." The bonesetter began shuffling toward the door. "I will bring water and bandages for her back," the woman added before she went to help the bonesetter from the room.

Once they were alone, Lavi allowed himself to absorb the slope of Lenalee's back. He looked down the rippled ravine of her spine, watched her ribs expand and contract as she breathed in and out. He lifted a hand to test the wound, gauge the swelling, but he thought better of it. Lavi cleared his throat and began gingerly inching the hem of Lenalee's camisole down her back. He didn't want to look at the angry graze across her skin, the blood welling up like red pearls against the air. She was beginning to bruise already, green and violet blotches spreading around the wound.

"How does it look?" she asked. Lavi could feel her jaw articulating against his shoulder, the bridge of her nose pressing into his neck.

"Like it hurts," he said. The strap of her camisole had slipped off her left shoulder, and Lavi hooked his index finger under it, pulled it back into place. The graze of his fingertip drew goosebumps across her skin, he noticed, and he quickly draped her coat over her shoulders again. "We'll get you bandaged up, give you some brandy, and let you sleep it off here. How does that sound?" he asked.

"That sounds wonderful," she sighed.

They waited like that, Lavi rubbing his hand up and down her left arm soothingly, until the woman returned, a roll of gauze in one hand, a mason jar of ice water in the other, and a white blanket folded over her arm. She explained apologetically that she could not find anything for Lenalee to change into, but once the fog cleared outside, she would send someone for something. In the meantime, she said, she would try to wash the blood from Lenalee's camisole.

When she stood over them, Lavi realized that the woman was expecting Lenalee to divest of her camisole and hand it over. He met Lenalee's gaze long enough to say _You can slap me later_, and pushed her coat off her shoulders. Careful to brush as little of his skin against hers, Lavi swallowed hard, pinched the hem of her camisole, and pulled it over Lenalee's ducked head. He saw her wince and fold her arms over her chest.

He quickly tossed the blanket around Lenalee's shoulders, wrapped it securely over her front. Once the woman was gone, jar and gauze left on the table, Lavi scooted back. He consciously and deliberately withdrew his hands and knotted them together in his lap.

"Sorry," he mumbled, "For, uh, the, you know..." His voice cracked again. He would have slapped a hand to his own forehead had he not had a pretty pretend-wife for an audience.

She looked up at him through her bangs. "Don't apologize just yet," she said. She was blushing. "I still need you to bandage my back."

It was an odd sensation, wanting something to be over while rather enjoying it. Lavi took the gauze and sat behind Lenalee. She slipped the blanket off her shoulders, exposing her back to him. He watched her fold her arms over her chest once more, saw the skin around the lesion on her back pull painfully. He began wrapping her ribs from as far away as possible.

"That sure started out as a good party," Lavi said offhandedly to distract himself from the horrible stretching of her bruised skin when she breathed.

"I love Saint Day feasts," Lenalee said. "I haven't seen one in so long. I wish we did more for them in the Order."

"We celebrate them, don't we?" Lavi asked.

He felt his knuckles graze the underside of Lenalee's breast. They both started, Lenalee winced from the jolt, and then they resolutely pretended that nothing had happened.

"Um," Lenalee began, flustered, "Uh, no. No, we don't," she managed.

This was ridiculous, he thought, and a hell of a lot more complicated than it needed to be. He couldn't touch her without getting all squeaky and awkward. Despite having slept with her—or perhaps because of it—Lavi couldn't remember ever feeling this anxious around Lenalee. "Sure we do," he argued, willing his hands steady. "We celebrate that big one, right?"

"I don't think Christmas counts, Lavi."

"No, no, that other big one. Saint... uh... Saint Zombie Jesus Day."

Lenalee laughed and held her side, her hand brushing his. "_Ow_, Lavi," she snapped. "Cut it out, would you? And I think you're thinking of _Easter_."

Lavi grinned. "Well, I think my name for it is a lot more descriptive," he countered as he smoothed the bandage across her back and tucked in the end. "And the Lord said unto his disciples, _Braaains._" He executed his best undead Savior voice.

"That is _so_ blasphemous."

"_Braaains._"

"Knock it off before someone hears you, Lavi."

"_Braaains!_"

He set his hands on her shoulders and leaned forward to chew on one of her pigtails. Lenalee squeaked and groaned and laughed. Her arms seemed to get tangled as she tried to hold her side, swat at Lavi, and cover her chest simultaneously. She managed to press the blanket to her bare front with the same arm holding her side while she tried to punch Lavi in the face.

"Would you stop?" she yelped through her laughter. "_Ow! _Lavi, _stop_ it!"

"I'm trying to get to the creamy nougat center," he said impatiently, his words muffled as he gnawed at her pigtail. Her hair smelled like soap and road dust and the earthy-sweetness of _girl_.

Lenalee's laughter was high and tumbling over itself and punctuated with groans and yelps, and Lavi felt rather like they shouldn't be having fun like this while mounds of dead desiccated to dust outside, but he couldn't help it. She had scared him. He had been so, so frightened. But her shoulders under his hands reminded him, and her slip of a back, curved and rippled like a whelk, against his chest reminded him, the supple edge of her ear and the yielding swell of her cheek and the perfect curve and recurve of her clavicles, and then they weren't playing anymore, and he was so relieved to have her there that he almost, _almost_, let it go on.

She wasn't laughing anymore. Her hand rested on his knee, the five rounded points of her fingertips applying just enough pressure to let Lavi know that she was on to him. She _knew_.

Lavi withdrew. "You should probably get some rest," he said, giving her shoulders a friendly squeeze.

She hesitated. Then, "Okay."

He slipped out from behind her. She gave him an indulgent smile that he didn't think he really deserved as he crouched next to her and eased her through the slow, painful process of turning and lying prone across the leather cushions.

Once she was stretched out down the length of the couch, her arms folded under her head, Lavi adjusted the blanket over her and tried not to think of the irony that he'd slept with her but this was the naked-est he'd ever seen her. He wanted to slip a hand under that blanket and maybe brush the backs of his fingers over the soft bow of her lower back. Maybe he could make it look like a friendly gesture. Lenalee would probably not be hard to convince of this. Lavi kept his hands resolutely where he could see them, though, because he would know the truth, and if there was one thing a Bookman _must_ have, it was integrity.

"What are you going to do?" Lenalee asked, peeking up from the crook of her elbow.

Lavi screwed up his mouth and looked around. "What do you think my chances are of finding a book in here that isn't about God?" She smiled again. Lavi put his hands on his knees and stood up. "I'll find something to pass the time. All you should worry about is resting."

Her eyelids were slipping closed when she said, "All right. Thanks, Lavi. For everything."

"No problem," he said, and once her eyes were closed, her breathing slow and steady, Lavi sank onto the opposite couch, propped his feet up on the table, and tried to think of anything he would rather do than watch her sleep.

x

x

x

Lavi didn't realize that he had fallen asleep until he was waking up. Pain coiled at the top of his neck from the way he had slept—sitting up, head tilted backwards against the back of the couch—and he groaned and rubbed his neck as he sat forward blearily.

The only light in the room came from a heavy, amber-colored paraffin lamp on a table by the entrance. Between the lamp and Lavi stood two dark, blurry shapes, and after much blinking and squinting, Lavi realized that Bill and Giorgio were looming over him.

"Oh, good, you're awake," Bill said.

Lavi scratched his scalp, stretched, and looked around. In the twilight, the antechamber was all rich mahoganies and golds and warm ochres; the high windows were columns of the diaphanous blue of seaside evening and the glass-faced cabinets were dim mirrors. He leaned around Giorgio and looked at the opposite couch. A thin, white blanket was draped over the back of the couch, and his partner was gone.

"Where's Lenalee?" Lavi asked, looking up at the finders, who exchanged a glance.

"I believe you would call it _having girltalk with God_," Giorgio offered dryly.

Lavi snorted. "She musta hit her head when she fell," he replied and rose to his feet with a groan. He stretched his arms over his head and let out a long, wide yawn. "Has the poison gas dissipated?" he asked, shoving a hand under his coat and scratching his ribs.

"Yes," Bill answered, "People have been coming and going from the church for an hour now."

"Good," Lavi said as he started to the door, "I'm ready to the get the hell outta here." As he walked past the finders, he noticed that neither of them were readily meeting his eye. Lavi couldn't help but wonder where they had gotten off to during the attack. In all the confusion, they certainly would not have been able to do much offensively; he imagined they were with the crowd, herding people and trying to waylay fears, which was probably the most useful thing they could have been doing. A part of Lavi knew that he shouldn't question their loyalty for it. Still, there was another part of him that knew he could.

The air was thick and warm in the dimly lit chapel. The tall, stout candles on the alter had been lit, casting shadows of the low railing separating the chancel from the nave across the floor before the pews. Lavi strolled into the chapel, his hands deep in his pockets, and he scanned the pews for Lenelee's pale face. The pews were dotted with the stray bowed head, and Lavi wondered dryly whose business would do better after the tragedy: the Church's or Karmenu's. He started down that avenue in his thoughts—if what the old trombonist had said was true, then why would Karmenu leave the church? And was there Innocence involved in his apostasy? And was it really these feelixirs creating and calling in crazies like the Tunisian man Lavi had met in jail? And and and—but he stopped himself. The stiffness in his neck was traveling north, it seemed, metamorphosing into a pounding in his head.

He spotted Lenalee in a wide niche on the opposite side of the chancel. The arched entry opened into an apse much smaller than the one over the altar, and set in the back was a faded painting of the Mother and Child. At the base of the image, perhaps a hundred small candles flickered in the red glass cups of a two-tiered, wrought iron votive stand. Lenalee sat on a bench with her back to the rest of the chapel, her shoulders gently sloped and her head tilted back just a degree.

Lavi's footsteps announced him before he could say anything, and Lenalee looked over her shoulder and smiled.

"You know, you probably don't want to be up, waltzing around for a while," Lavi said as he came up by Lenalee's left and rested his elbows against the back of the bench.

"Trust me, I wasn't waltzing," Lenalee said, laughing quietly. "I was inching." She looked back up at the painting looming over them in it's chipped, gilded frame.

"I didn't interrupt anything, did I?"

Lenalee smiled. It was not lost on her that Lavi had asked without a hint of sarcasm. "Not at all," she said. "I just came out here to light a few candles." She could see out of her peripheral vision Lavi's hands hanging near her left shoulder. The combination of the red glow of the candles, his proximity, and the brandy one of the Sisters had given her made Lenalee feel quite warm and comfortable. "I lit one for you, one for all the people who died today, and one for all the people who survived."

"I get my very own candle?" he asked incredulously.

Lenalee smiled, watched the Virgin's serene face. "Of course." She heard him shuffle his feet, glanced over in time to see him clasp and unclasp his hands. "Did you see Giorgio and Bill? They're okay."

"Yeah, they came and found me," Lavi said. "Giorgio didn't seem to be his usual, friendly self."

"No, I wouldn't expect him to be."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Lenalee thought for a moment and shook her head. Lavi could be so dense sometimes. She shifted in her seat to get a better look at her partner and sucked in a breath when she inadvertently tweaked her injured ribs. Even with the brandy, a solid jolt of pain spread out from that epicenter in her side, and she took a moment to let it pass. When she opened her eyes, Lavi was watching her, his brow knit.

"This was an important day for him," Lenalee said, her voice still a little hoarse.

"Why's he gotta take it out on me?" Lavi sighed.

Lenalee twisted her mouth as she considered how best to explain it. "Lavi," she started, "Imagine you've got something you really care about. And it's something that I really don't care about. In fact, I _mock_ it to your face."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Lavi interrupted her, "I get it. And one day this thing I care about is in danger, and you swoop in and defend it while I can only watch powerlessly, right? I bet I'd be frustrated. I bet my little pride would be hurt, which would be really ironic if this thing I was powerless to protect dictated that pride was the first and worst sin in the history of, you know, everything."

He did have a point, Lenalee thought; however, he didn't need to be such a jerk about it. "I know you're right, Lavi," she countered, "But if you're in the mood for irony, maybe you should take a look at your holier-than-thou attitude."

He stood up straight and set his hands on the back of the bench. "My _what_?" he asked slowly, deliberately.

"Everyone's a hypocrite sometimes," she said compassionately. He was staring at her hard, and it occurred to her then that she might have actually offended him. Lenalee set her hand, with some effort, on Lavi's. She could almost discern the thoughts passing through his eye. As it was, she could make out only their shadows. "You ready to head back to the hotel?"

"Yeah," Lavi said shortly, pulling his hand out from under hers.

Lenalee grimaced as she scooted forward. She set one hand on the back of the bench and one on the seat. With her teeth grit, she started to push herself up, trying to tip her center of balance over her knees. But every motion, every breath sent bolts of pain down her side, and she had lifted herself only inches from the bench when tears began gathering in her eyes. She fell back into her seat with a yelp.

"Damn," she hissed. Getting up off the couch hadn't been this hard. Clearly, enough time had passed since her two stinging gulps of brandy for the effects to start wearing off. Squaring her shoulders and keeping her back straight, Lenalee tried to push off again.

Lavi stepped grudgingly up in front of her. "You gonna need a wheelchair?" he asked dryly, wrapping one hand around her upper arm to help her.

"_No_," Lenalee scowled up at him. "Help me up," she grumbled, and she took his free hand in hers.

With much effort and deep breathing, wrestling and frustrated laughter—Lavi muttered such supportive things as, "I have handled sacks of potatoes more coordinated than you,"—they managed to level her up onto her feet. Once she was standing, Lavi practically had his arms wrapped around her, one under each arm, and she could feel his laughter in his chest. Lenalee steadied herself, and Lavi stooped down until he was almost nose to nose with her, his mouth pressed tight and his eye narrowed. She blushed and pulled back as much as her injured ribs would let her.

"What?" she demanded.

Lavi sniffed loudly. "What is that?" he asked incredulously.

Lenalee frowned defensively. "One of the Sisters gave me something to drink when she brought my shirt back. I think it was brandy."

"I see," Lavi said. If he was trying to repress his grin, he was doing a poor job of it. "Come on, Autonoë."

"What did you just call me?" Lenalee snapped, setting her fists against her hips.

Lavi withdrew a little. "Oh," he said, "Autonoë... she's—"

"I know who she is!" Lenalee interrupted, "And I don't appreciate the comparison."

She glared up into his face, waited for him to laugh at her or pinch her or do _something_ retaliatory. But he didn't. He furrowed his brow and blinked his one eye, green as verdigris. He laughed in his throat, a sound of surprise.

"What?" Lenalee demanded again.

He opened his mouth like he was going to explain. It hung open a moment longer before he shook his head. "Nothing," he conceded. His voice was weightless, tinged with a pleasant sort of disbelief. Lenalee did not entirely believe him but decided not to press it. "Let's hit the road," he suggested. He hovered at her side, his arms out, waiting to help her. He moved like he was ready to hook an arm around her back and brace her, but she waved him away. They began the long, plodding journey from the church to their hotel, Lavi's arm draped over her shoulders, loose and compassionate.

Lenalee was sure it must have been frustrating for him, matching her stride, but he stayed at her side for most of the walk: he broke away once to run a lap around her—to keep himself from falling asleep, he claimed—and once more to open the door to the hotel for her. They trudged up the stairs, down the corridor, and to Lenalee's door. Admittedly, she could probably use a hand getting herself recumbent. However, she would just have to handle it on her own because when she turned and asked Lavi if he had meant what he had said about her and the sack of potatoes, he laughed and told her that, no, he hadn't meant it and that, even busted up, _she still moved like water_, and Lenalee knew then that she couldn't let him cross her threshold. She subsequently wished him good night and disappeared into her hotel room.

Lavi watched her door close. Once she was gone, he bumped the side of his closed fist against his forehead, grit his teeth, and cursed _everything_. He then turned and unlocked the door to his hotel room. He found his luggage at the foot of the bed, rooted around for the bottle he had stolen from Karmenu's shop, and once he found it, he wrenched his window open, leaned out, and hurled the bottle out into the street. It hit the stucco storefront opposite and shattered with a unobtrusive chime.


	10. Distant

**A/N:** Hello, readership. Sorry for the lengthy silence. Between losing a job, and then finding one, and totaling my car - or I should say having my car totaled as I was deemed not-at-fault for the wreck - and then buying a new (to me) one, I've been pretty much booked. Long story short, here's chapter 10!

**X. Distant**

The pain in her side woke Lenalee before dawn. Before she could peel back her eyelids, she felt water gathered at the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was dry, her tongue tacky against the roof of her mouth, but she was not sure she could get up to retrieve a glass of water. She lolled her head to the right, looked at the alarm clock. It read five in the morning.

Through her clenched teeth, Lenalee's breath hissed as she tried to level herself up. She could not push herself far, however, and she fell back with a yelp. She looked at her clock once more. Lavi would be up in a few hours, she thought. She would have to wait for him to come find her. In the meantime, she closed her eyes and willed her mind quiet.

When a knock finally sounded from the door, Lenalee opened her eyes and almost sat up right. She quelled the instinct, though, before she could really hurt herself, but she regretted her eagerness to see Lavi just the same. Her heart was fluttering like a chickadee in a cage, and Lenalee closed her eyes. She gave herself a moment to swim in that feeling—relief, contentment, _You still move like water—_and then pushed it back.

"Come in," she said and glanced at her clock. She had lain awake for almost two hours.

The doorknob turned, the latch clicked, and the hinges squeaked, and Lenalee peered through the dim to see not Lavi but Giorgio slip into her room, the stripes of sunlight leaking in around the curtains cast across him.

"Good morning, Lenalee," he said, stopping in the doorway.

Lenalee winced as she pushed herself up onto her elbows. "Giorgio," she said, "Where's Lavi?"

He paused before answering, and Lenalee rather wished she could see his face better. "Lavi and Bill have left to see Karmenu."

"What?"

"Lavi asked me to take you to a doctor."

Lenalee's mouth sagged. "What?"

Giorgio lingered respectfully in the doorway. "He believes you need to see a doctor, and I agree with him," Giorgio explained. "You need a translator to do this."

"So he ditched me?" she demanded, frozen and leaning back on her elbows.

Giorgio hesitated. He took two steps into the room. "Perhaps you will believe that no matter what I say, yes?" Farther into the room, Giorgio was easier to see through the dusty dim. Lenalee could make out his eyes, the whites almost luminescent against his brown skin.

Lenalee rolled her eyes and snorted. Abstractly, she knew that Giorgio was an unworthy recipient of her animus. Also, and rather less abstractly, she recognized where the hostility came from: she'd been waiting for Lavi.

"Perhaps he would benefit from a morning outside your company?" Giorgio hazarded sagely. From what she could see of his face, Lenalee could tell that Giorgio was venturing into territory that he found about as welcoming as she did.

Lenalee felt her cheeks heat up. She swallowed.

"Perhaps you would benefit as well."

She switched her gaze away and began pushing herself up painfully. "I don't know what you're talking about," she muttered between grimaces.

Giorgio stepped closer and placed a hand between her shoulder blades, applying just enough pressure to ease her up. "Neither does Lavi, I think." He slipped his hand into the pocket of his Finders robes and produced a tarnished flash. The cap squeaked as he unscrewed it. "A gift from the innkeeper," Giorgio said, holding the flask toward Lenalee. She flicked her eyes incredulously from Giorgio to the flask and back again. "It's a very long walk, Lenalee."

"Thank you," she said grudgingly and accepted the flask. She took one painful swallow and jerked the flask from her lips, coughing. Giorgio chuckled at her and slipped the flask from her hand, recapped it, and pocketed it.

"When I was your age," Giorgio said, putting an arm around Lenalee's ribs and hoisting her up. She acquiesced and took her time getting her feet beneath her, "That was all the medicine we had. That and the _Mediterran_."

Lenalee gripped Giorgio's heavy shoulders as she steadied herself. She laughed. "Whiskey and sea water?"

"If that did not cure you, you were in God's hands," he added wryly.

Lenalee smiled and wondered if that had been a comfort to Giorgio as a child.

The whiskey was like a coal in her empty stomach, heat trickling into her chest and out into her veins. It felt a bit like the bottled affection.

As she and Giorgio made their protracted way to the door and down the stairs, Lenalee thought of the men she had met who needed wine to sleep. There were more than a few of them in the Black Order. She had known men who could not hear the world over the noise in their own minds without the ataractic effects of a drink, those men who needed it to keep them from feeling. She wondered if there were similar men who would need a feelixir for the reverse. Giorgio's heavy, thick shoulder worked under her hand as he helped her along, and she considered the feeling, that alien notion, the odd sensation of a man. Perhaps there were men who would need Karmenu's tinctures to feel grief or joy or any of the gamut of emotions Karmenu had to offer.

She thought then of Lavi. Of _Toshe_. Whoever that may be. A man who needed humor to express his rancor with God, who needed flippancy to mimic the motions of getting close to someone, who needed his Bookman's cloister to find security. What, she wondered, could drive a person to that, to be so robbed of his trust as to feel safe only when alone? And how then, and why, attempt this facade of his? He feigned candor with her and everyone to keep them at a distance. And she wondered if he realized, just as she was beginning to realize, that it was not working. If he wanted to remain in his watchtower, so safe and high up, he should have forsaken a lot more than just his name.

But she knew his name. Lenalee knew his secret. And as much as she wanted to cup it in her hands and keep it safe, she also wanted to say it to him over and over and over again. _Toshe Toshe Toshe. _More than ever before. She wanted to see him so badly. She wanted to tell him.

Lenalee glanced up at Giorgio, across the breakfast table from her. She doubted that this was the result he had anticipated when he arranged for her to spend the morning away from Lavi.

x

x

x

Lavi wasn't aware that he was dragging his own feet until he caught sight of the annoyed glanced Bill was tossing in the direction of his shoes. Gravel cracked dryly as they made their way south, Lavi slipping a pace or so behind Bill periodically. The wind smelled of fish and minerals, like the sea was a big stew with all the ingredients of life kept on a low simmer. When gusts caught them up, Lavi noticed the way Bill's lip curled. He rather thought Bill looked like the sort of peaked, undernourished fellow—limby and limp like a plant grown without enough sunlight—who got seasick.

That was an awfully unfriendly thing to think, Lavi told himself. And Bill was certainly undeserving of his festering discontent that morning.

"You were a lot more perky about seeing the Tunisian guy in jail," Bill remarked.

Lavi scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, I got a lot on my mind this morning."

Bill snorted. "I bet."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Lavi snapped.

Bill shrugged and held up his hands in surrender. Lavi snorted. He knew exactly what that was supposed to mean. The entrance to the street where Karmenu sold his tinctures was up ahead, and try as he might to drum up the thorough interrogation he had planned for the Spirit Doctor, Lavi was distracted. He couldn't stop thinking about that secret Lenalee had been about to tell him, the one she had brought up before the Ascension Day celebration had kicked off. It was bugging the hell out of him, and the only thing that helped was entertaining the notion of asking her what it was when he got back. Not that he would.

Maybe, he thought as they drew up to the entrance to of _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr_, she was going to tell him about her faith. She had been, after all, holding the hand of the Holy Mother when she had turned to him and asked cryptically for his permission. Perhaps she wanted to tell him something she thought only he would understand, a doubt or an insecurity?

Lavi hardily registered the heat of the brass doorknob against his palm, the jingle of the bell overhead. Maybe, he wondered, she was going to say something about the Order. Maybe she was thinking about retiring. He felt something in his chest clench excitedly at the thought. If she were out of the order... if she were just another girl...

The interior of _Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr_ was as dim and dusty as before, the muted light through the thin, green curtains seemed to drift, lambent and underwater. A man stood at the counter across from the door, his back to the entrance. From behind the man, glass clinked thickly against glass.

Maybe, Lavi thought, she was going to say something really personal. Something about the fact that they had rolled out of the same bed that morning. She could have been gearing up to tell him that she liked it.

He willed his head clear, pushed his thoughts out of the way like they were biscuits on a shuffleboard. He knew that allowances like that were dangerous. He couldn't let his mind wander, even if he was the only one to know about it. And it wasn't really hurting anyone. And it was kinda fun.

"Karmenu?" Lavi called out.

The man at the counter smiled briefly over his shoulder and turned back to the counter. "Young Exorcist," he said as he arranged and rearranged glass bottles on the counter.

Being called _cleric_, Lavi expected, but it was only an informed witness who called him _exorcist._ "Maybe I should call you _Father_ Karmenu, and then we'll be even?"

Karmenu laughed good-naturedly and slipped around the back of the counter, revealing a small pyramid of stout, brown bottles and a folded paper sign with Maltese characters on it.

"You," Karmenu said, pointing at Lavi, "Have been investigating me, yes?" Lavi didn't respond. "I wonder who would tell you such a thing. I am a source of a great deal of shame, you know. The village apostate."

"Kind of ironic," Lavi said off-handedly as he came forward and leaned an elbow against the counter, "That the town backslider would also be an Innocence User."

Karmenu laughed again. "Perhaps you know everything about me, Bookman," he said and winked. "Where is your lady friend this morning? I heard that she sustained no small injury while defending the church."

"She's fine," Lavi said, picking the top bottle off the pyramid and turning it over in his hand. "She's at the doctor this morning." He flicked his eye up. "The real doctor."

The label on the front of the bottle had, like the others, a series of words in different languages, which Lavi could only take to be translations of the emotion stoppered within. He scanned through the Italian and Arabic, Maltese and Sicillian, and found the English. _ATTACHMENT. _

"One part affection to two parts loyalty. A spoonful of friendship and just a splash of lust," Karmenu explained as Lavi considered the bottle. "Perhaps I should credit you, Exorcist. I designed that one with you in mind."

Lavi rather thought he was being manipulated, and he did not appreciate it. He put down the bottle hard and glared at Karmenu. "All right. You got me," he said, part friendly, part firmly. "What is this stuff? What are you up to in here?"

"You want to know what happened when you tried the Affection that you stole from me?" Karmenu asked, cracking a bright, white smile. He was toying with Lavi, or at least trying to.

Lavi did not flinch. "What did you do?" he demanded. "What was that stuff?" And why was it not wearing off? Why was it getting worse?

Karmenu crouched behind the counter, disappearing. His voice carried up from the floor over the shuffling of objects being pushed around a cupboard. "You are not the first to ask," he said, "Although, I must admit, I'm surprised to hear such a question from you."

Lavi glanced over his shoulder at Bill, who was standing very still near the door. "Why's that?"

Karmenu popped back up, a basin in one hand and a clear glass bottle in the other. "Because," he said, setting the basin and bottle on the counter, "You are immune."

Lavi furrowed his brow.

"At first, I believed you were immune because you are a fellow Innocent," Karmenu said. He began rolling up his sleeves. "But your pretty lady friend was not immune, and she wears the same insignia you do. She is an exorcist as well?"

"Yeah," Lavi replied, suspicion creeping into his voice.

"So, then my assumption is incorrect. Your Innocence does not protect you from my influence. No, rather there is something about you personally, my young friend, that insulates you from _my_ Innocence." Karmenu lifted his right hand to his face. He pressed the ring on his middle finger—a wide, flat, black stone—to the crease between his brows, closed his eyes, and began to draw his knuckles from his face. A strand trailed after his hand, linking his hand and brow, a thin filament of gold. With a quick switch of his wrist, Karmenu snapped the filament from his brow and tossed it into the bowl. He then unscrewed the cap from the bottle and splashed a clear liquid into the basin. The golden thread dissolved instantly.

"The hell is that?" Lavi asked, leaning forward to peer into the basin.

"As you manipulate that impressive hammer of yours, friend, I manipulate the emotions, mine and others." Karmenu pushed the basin toward Lavi, allowing him a better look. The liquid inside could have been water were it not for the strong aroma of grain alcohol. "For instance, in this basin there are a few doses of excitement. You see, I am excited to see you returned to my shop, and I harvested that notion. I must admit, you rather intrigue me, Mister..." Karmenu raised his brows at Lavi expectantly.

Lavi narrowed his eye, hesitated. "Lavi," he replied simply.

"Mr. Lavi," Karmenu concluded with a nod. "Yes, I was looking forward to your return." Karmenu lifted the basin with both hands and gave it a swirl. "I imagine you noticed your partner's distinct response to my attention during your last visit. This was, of course, my doing. A harmless practice, but, well, I am a businessman, after all." Karmenu shrugged. "Still, your indifference to my efforts was truly remarkable."

Lavi thought for a moment. "That doesn't many any sense," he said. "If I really am immune to your Innocence, why did the affection..." he hesitated, looking for the right words, "have any effect?"

Karmenu smiled. "Why, indeed." He crouched down a second time, and when he stood again, he held a funnel and two bottles threaded in his fingers. He set them all on the counter. "I suppose there were other stimuli at play."

Lavi switched his gaze away for a moment. Karmenu seized back his attention when he set his elbows on the countertop. "So what, do you suppose, shields you? I could compel your friend there," he gestured toward Bill, "to weep like he's seen his first daughter born or like he's seen his mother buried, but I could not make you blink without throwing sand in your eye."

"Easy," Lavi said, masking the gamut of other things flooding his mind, "I'm a bookman. Stoicism is our first precept."

Karmenu let out a bark of a laugh. "I suppose your lady friend would testify to this, too?"

_She'd be lying if she did_. "Yeah, she would, as a matter of fact."

"Pity," Karmenu said, leveling himself off the counter.

Lavi frowned. "What's got you so interested in Lenalee?" he asked, schooling his tone. He had the distinct impression that, while Karmenu could not manipulate his emotions, he certainly could read them very well. Whether that was another facet to the renounced priest's Innocence or simply a case of sharp intuition, Lavi couldn't be sure. And that ambiguity made him trust the man even less.

Karmenu raised his eyebrows. "Perhaps stoicism is a tenet to you, but surely even you, Mr. Lavi, can guess the answer to that question."

Had Lavi not been so practiced in quelling his knee-jerk reactions, he would have grabbed Karmenu by his thick, glossy hair and cracked his nose into the countertop. Instead, Lavi smiled. "Jeez, when you quit the clergy, you quit cold turkey, didn't you?"

Karmenu laughed. "For some men, the cloth is a lifestyle of liberation and simplicity. For others, it is fetters."

"I take it you're the latter?"

Karmenu set one hand on the counter and rubbed his smooth, square chin with the other. It seemed like the first honest gesture Lavi had seen him perform. "My relationship with the Lord is a complicated one. Just as all relationships are," Karmenu mused. "And the Lord, in all His business, does not require an intercessor on His behalf. The Church worked only to complicate this relationship more. Nothing steals the soul from a miracle like analysis."

That last bit sounded to Lavi rather like something Lenalee would say to him.

"As a man—and just a man—I am allowed the freedom to see God everywhere." Karmenu had been gazing toward the whitewashed ceiling, but at this, he dropped his eyes to Lavi. "And everywhere, He is." He smiled, and something about the lack of teeth, the unskewed expression of it, struck Lavi as sincere. "And now, I am granted the benediction of seeing the Lord in the sea. In the soil. In your fair friend, Lenalee."

"You know, most folks see the Church as a bridge for their relationship with God. It's got guidelines, sure, but those are supposed to direct you," Lavi countered for argument's sake.

"Do you have guidelines for your relationships?" Karmenu cut across Lavi. He paused then and blinked his dark eyes. "But of course you do. You're a Bookman."

"It's a disciplined lifestyle," Lavi said with a shrug.

"Then perhaps you are the kind of cleric who finds liberation and simplicity in his restrictions." Karmenu studied him for a moment, his brow furrowed. Then he said, "But I doubt it."

Karmenu did well not to let all the layers of that statement flake away immediately, and as Lavi peeled them back, he felt his hackles rise. There were far too many accusations there. Lavi said, cold and firm, "We're nothing alike, buddy."

Karmenu smiled at him.

"_You_ look at self-control as a burden," Lavi said, "like an ox looks at a yoke. But you know what? You're still an animal, and even when you don't have that yoke on, you're still a slave to your animalistic impulses," Lavi snapped.

"And you are a slave to your deprivation," Karmenu countered calmly.

"Deprivation of what?" Lavi barked. "Do I look deprived?" He spread his hands as though presenting himself for Karmenu's scrutiny.

Karmenu leaned over the counter. "Yes, sir. Yes, you do."

"Listen, _pal_—"

"You look like a man who has tasted his own instincts and now he craves them. You look like a domesticant, a dog who goes to sleep at night and dreams of eating the hearts of lions. But now you've seen, my very young friend, that there are such things as wolves who actually do. I'll tell you this, before your dam breaks and you tear into the forest with the rest of the Bacchae, when a man starves himself until sundown, he gluts himself until he is sick; when a man enjoys his meals, he rests heavy and well at night."

Lavi felt his mouth pressed thin. "Well, I can see why you've bailed on the Church."

"And I can see why you haven't."

Lavi wanted to shout at him, explain that he hated the Church for what he'd seen it do to men, for what it had once done, a very long time ago, to him. He wanted to explain the differences between being a Priest and a Bookman, that they were nothing alike, that he would ally himself to book and pen and ink but never to anything as nebulous as words. He wanted to prove that he was the kind of cleric who relished in the freedom of his temperance, that he was not weak like Karmenu was, that he found his passion in dispassion.

But as soon as he reached that conclusion, he knew that he had defeated himself. He turned and strode past Bill, who was standing, motionless and stunned, by the entrance. Lavi slammed the door behind him, practically loosing the bells from their nail in the jamb. Dark clouds were curdling against the horizon in the distance, choking the collar of the sky and releasing gasps of jagged lighting into the sea. After a moment, Bill slipped through the door. Lavi took off down the street and did not wait for Bill to catch up.


End file.
